In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Professionals
- Opportunities For Health Businesses
- Basic Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Medical And Health Services Practitioners – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with valuable content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
WordPress Medical & Health Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site 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. A premium version of this plugin with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create your event and start accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating 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 plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor 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, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or 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 text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will 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, 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)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- 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, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to grow your medical-related web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)