In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Services Professionals – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web 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 sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up an online discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness tools, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up 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 spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health & Medical Center Site
WordPress Plugins For Health
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides 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.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress – User 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their 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 For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays 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 – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This 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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
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