In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Professionals
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical Practitioners – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
This section will show you ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to health applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Map Integration
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create an event and start processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your fitness website.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)