In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health Professionals
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
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 Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
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 (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up an online social network on your site.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up a discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
This section explains ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engaging with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to health applications, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Users can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some 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 & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Medical Practice Services Business Generation
Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create multiple events and begin processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical use, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient 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 WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, 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 inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering 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. 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 WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise illustrations on your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health-related business online.
To continue, click this link:
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"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)