In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your medical-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores how to improve your medical or health-related business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can select which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins & Themes
Health And Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of medical or health-related uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up an event and start receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure 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, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress 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 other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets users find posts with specific article 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health and fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business presence online.
To view Part Three, click here:
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