In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create 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 lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up and run a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
An effective way to get your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors report problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the right department.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some popular 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 And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range of medical or health-related businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Plugin
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned 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, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
This free plugin 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 check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays 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 – Results)
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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets your visitors search posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your readers 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, 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this step-by-step article on ways to build your medical or health-related business presence online.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)