In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Health And Medical Center Website – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and run your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, 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
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option 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 the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right area.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Health & Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin receiving registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin 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 that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and 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 shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic content editor 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what 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 gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, 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 recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum