In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can help to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can add social features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section will show you ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health apps, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up your event and start accepting registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related uses, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets 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 insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets visitors search posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed includes over 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 can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,500+ conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)