In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
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 covered in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving your health or medical business online using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engaging with users
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct area.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins For Health Professionals
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports-related uses, such as medical practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily set up multiple events and start processing bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website 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 that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – 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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that locates posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors 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 their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- 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. 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click this link:
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