In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Professionals
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Center Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value information and give them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving 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
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct person.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Plugins For Health And Medical Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule your event and start receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are many you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index 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 additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains 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)
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, locations, create staff member pages for therapists/doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,500 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that 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, live custom formatting, 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group