In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Providers
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
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 (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to run a social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health apps, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let readers raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set 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 ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct department.
Adding Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
Medical & Health Services – 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 some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of medical or health-related uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health applications, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 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, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets visitors find posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
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 read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ 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 visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful 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 & 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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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