In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical And Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Health Practice Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we’ll show you ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, free trials, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins 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 WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online 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 supports multiple languages. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily set up your event and start processing online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators 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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that 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 supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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 Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,500+ conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin 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 dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your fitness sites.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at themes for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
Click here to continue reading:
***
***
"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)