In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical And Health Services Providers – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving your medical or health business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and manage a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section looks at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Visitors can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the clinic they want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct destination.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Medical Or Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health-related uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start accepting online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health use, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create 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 extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to 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 – WordPress Plugin – 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets users find posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even 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 using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
This simple 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 For WordPress – 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 own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your health and fitness-related site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To keep reading, click this link:
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