In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Basic Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Professionals – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up and run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with other prospective customers
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health applications, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also lets users report concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they want to reach. This helps get their message to the right person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins For Medical And Health Services Providers
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports-related uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily create an event and start processing registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol 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)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 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 plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your health and fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will be discussing health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to view Part Three:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum