In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical apps, coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- 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 page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct department.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create an event and begin processing bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are a number you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various 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)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to 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)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes 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 For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you add 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
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 own a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on 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 – 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now