In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical-related business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical & Health Center Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Business Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
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
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you set up and manage a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to entice your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with high value content and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness apps, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right destination.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
WordPress Plugins For Medical
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health-related uses, such as medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,000 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 Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin lets you 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish 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, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your health and fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum