In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social community on your website.
- bbPress – Run an online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical applications, discount coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Add A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health-related uses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data 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.
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, plus a search feature that lets visitors search posts with specific data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors 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 text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your medical or health-related web presence.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum