In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up and run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- 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 products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with high value content and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Medical & Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
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 health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create your event and begin processing bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related uses, but there are a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie 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, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein 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 plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin 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 other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data 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 For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A simple 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile 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, service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from related 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 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. 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 For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your fitness websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical business presence online.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)