In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical business presence online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Opportunities For The Medical And Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Blog’s Functionality
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Health Services Practitioners – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your health-related website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – 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 health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you set up your own forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- 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 user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Users can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and 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 spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and customers can plan their appointments better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments 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 is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical usage, but there are many you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate 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 Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on 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. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your medical or health web presence.
Click on this link to view Part Three:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com