In Part One of this article on ways to build your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your medical business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own online social community on your site.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness applications, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
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 choose the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right area.
Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
WordPress Plugins For Medical And Health Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out 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 that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets visitors search posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed contains 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see 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 receive valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, 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, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts 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 own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your medical-related business presence online.
Click here to continue:
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