In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Center Website – Improving Your Business Online 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 Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- 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 SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can add social features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with new prospective customers
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value information and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness tools, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the correct destination.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related applications, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker 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 the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 a number of other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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 clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato 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 medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,500 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress 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, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your 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 using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD 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, 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users 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 – 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise images inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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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.
Click here to read the rest of this article:
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