In Part One of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Health Services Professionals – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with users
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving health and diet, access to medical tools, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you create multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Provide Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management System
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and begin receiving registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use that 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets site visitors search for posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in 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 was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, 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 consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat 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 using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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