In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health Providers In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section explores ways to improve your medical or health business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up and run a social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- 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
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and fitness, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option 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 select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-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)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create an event and start accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin 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 and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin can be used to 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)
Information about drugs 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets visitors search posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
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)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information on health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress 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 forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
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, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, your site visitors 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we will look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
To continue, 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