In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own online social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving general health and diet, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a 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 will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and begin receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related usage, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can 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 plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
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 additional plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 calculate 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)
Drug Interaction Data 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 as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
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 WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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 using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. 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 Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – 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 display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your health or medical business web presence.
Click here to read the rest of this guide:
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