In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing 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 page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their comment to the right destination.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps plan their trips better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more 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
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Medical Services & Health-Related Site Using Plugins & Themes
Medical Or Health – 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 some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin processing registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro 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 medical or health-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This free plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 WordPress Plugin – Results)
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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets site visitors search posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed includes 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 For WordPress)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, service locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read 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 receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your visitors 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 video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite 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 posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized 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, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now