In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health or medical-related business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins and themes that can help improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more visitors.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available many plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is 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
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms to your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct department.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Medical Services And Health Practice Website Using WordPress Plugins
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 site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health applications, but there are quite a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various 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)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 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 figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering 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 Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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 Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise illustrations in your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this comprehensive article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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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)