In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Online Opportunities For Medical & Health Professionals
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical applications, discount vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health 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 processing online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health use, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- 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 Plugin)
This plugin 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 Plugin – Data 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds 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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
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 from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors 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 over video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin 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-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we discuss WordPress themes for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue reading, click this link:
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