In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – 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 your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to run a social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and fitness, access to medical applications, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right destination.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some 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 Driving More Web Traffic
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up an event and begin receiving online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are quite a number you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets users search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
***
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya