In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you set up a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health and fitness, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the right destination.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and helps clients can plan their appointments better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up your event and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned 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, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake 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 great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to 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 look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin retrieves and displays 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 – WordPress Plugin – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your health & fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your health and fitness-related website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to build your health or medical web presence.
Click here 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)