In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared with other potential clients
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical tools, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps plan their visits better
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are quite a number you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. This 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)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor 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)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,700+ conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling 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 dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your health and fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your fitness website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we discuss themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group