In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your health business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Practice Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you set up your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets users raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct person.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive 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 provide a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and begin accepting online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are quite a few you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD 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, 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress 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 run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your health & fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your content.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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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)