In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Website Generation With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health And Medical Services Providers – WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores how to improve your medical business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct department.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more 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 That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Health And Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create your event and begin accepting online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The data is provided by 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets site visitors search for posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read 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 can access valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to 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 site, users 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will 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, cite or read 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 for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site users 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your health-related web presence.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum