In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health or medical business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Providers
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and run your own online social community on your site.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases 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.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness applications, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient 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 contact form plugin lets you create multiple contact forms on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right area.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 health or medical use, but there are many you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie 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 useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
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 written in online 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 over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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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