In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your medical or health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This helps get their message to the right area.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Health And Medical
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports uses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. 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 offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin receiving online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
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 – Information Screen)
Drug information 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 converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what 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 over 14,700 conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise diagrams to your health & fitness website.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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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)