In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health or medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Professionals – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available many plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
An effective way to get your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving general health and diet, access to health applications, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Website
Health & Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and start accepting bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over 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 provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related uses, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple 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 WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting 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 Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 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 plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create staff listings for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,000 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress 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, even 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum