In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With WP Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health And Medical Services Providers – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your 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.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features to your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health apps, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to raise concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so users can select which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site 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
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily set up an event and start accepting online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
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 shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress 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 experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 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 HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your 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 using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – 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)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images inside your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we discuss medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to continue:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum