In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical or health business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web 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 (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features to your site.
(You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct person.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins For Medical & Health Businesses
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and begin receiving online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple 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 Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets users search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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)
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, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable 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 Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the 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 video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and 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 – 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 & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your health or medical business presence online.
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)