In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical or health business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capability
- WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Health And Medical Services Professionals – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with high value information and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving health and diet, access to health calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right area.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Website Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily create an event and start receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health usage, but there are a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
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 Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WP 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 BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive 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 BMI
- 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 will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets site visitors find posts with specific data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato 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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,000 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, your site 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 select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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 Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this step-by-step article on ways to build your medical or health business presence online.
To continue reading, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie