In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical-Related Businesses Online
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With WordPress Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this free plugin to set up and run your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with other potential clients
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health and diet, access to fitness tools, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Users can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
A 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 set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related applications, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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 Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable 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
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will add 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts 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 consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating Labels)
This plugin 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 or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we will be discussing medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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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