In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Clinic Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content 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 sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to health apps, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create multiple contact forms to your website, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Health Or Medical Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up your event and begin processing bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health uses, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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 is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple 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 plugins you can check out 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- 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 For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets site visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 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 plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create staff listings for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, 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}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise illustrations on your health & fitness website.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss health and medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to improve your medical business presence online.
Click here to access Part Three:
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