In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Basic Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores ways of improving your medical business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and manage your own online forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with others
A proven way to entice visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
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 visitors can select the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive 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 with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up your event and start processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 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 or health-related usage, but there are quite a few you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP 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 Calculator
- And many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
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 other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index 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 users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets site visitors search for posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic 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 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
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 website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at medical clinics and health-related themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click here:
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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)