In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services
- Essential Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with valuable content and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to medical calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors 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 is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin 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 health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they are contacting you about. This helps get their message to the right department.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Health & Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of medical or health-related businesses, such as dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health use, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed includes over 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 was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 gain insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
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 posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise images inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your medical-related business online.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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