In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run an online social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up and run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to entice your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to fitness applications, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Readers can report concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces 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 page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress 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 submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their comment to the right area.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Health And Medical
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical usage, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version with a ton of extra 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 periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to 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 – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets users search posts with specific data. A basic content editor 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
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 related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts 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 run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your readers 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, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence.
To continue, click this link:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)