In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Medical Providers – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
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 and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could 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 increasing interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with other potential clients
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide them with information of high value and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins & Themes
WordPress Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run 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 set up multiple events and start accepting bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. You can learn more about this here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical use, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by 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 add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 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, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or 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.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health & fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To keep reading, 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)