In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Practitioners – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you set up a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Readers can raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct area.
Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here 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
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule an event and begin receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are a number you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
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 a number of plugins you can look at to 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 (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Drug information 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that locates posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you add 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to continue:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum