In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Essential Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical And Health Services Providers – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and driving more visitors to your website.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below 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)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and run your own social community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with high value information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to health tools, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also let users provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right destination.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Medical Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily create an event and start accepting online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical uses, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace 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)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. 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 the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This free plugin installs a widget on 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 other plugins you can use to 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, 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 visitors to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and 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 using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 run a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise images in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to build your health-related web presence.
To continue, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)