In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your health-related website with WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- 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
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits 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 offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for engaging with users
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to health apps, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Medical And Health Services Website Using Plugins
WordPress Health Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment 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 of health or medical-related businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email 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 – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up your event and begin processing online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related applications, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content 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 Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise illustrations in your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will be discussing health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum