In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical business online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
How To Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and generating more web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you run your own social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up an online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
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 allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related website to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them 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 add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
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 additional WordPress plugins you can use 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets users find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, your site visitors 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your 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, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
This plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health and fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we discuss health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your medical or health business online.
Click here to keep reading:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)