In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Professionals
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up an online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
This section explains ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- 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 provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with others
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with information of high value and give them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right department.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients 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 & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Medical And Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your 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)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create an event and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- 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)
This plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
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 drug names are converted 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 lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed includes 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can 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)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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 Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating 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 Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutrition 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 and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise diagrams in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business online.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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