In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Services & Health Practice Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for enticing visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide users with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let readers send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- 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
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps 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 SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
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 software lets you easily schedule your event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data 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 – Information Screen)
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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,700 conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(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)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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 – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue:
***
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com