In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health Professionals
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve your health website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits, 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 products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with other potential customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to medical tools, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing 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 page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right recipient.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports-related uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and start accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related usage, but there are a few you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie 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 WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
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. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- 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)
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 – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 converts common names of drugs to their 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, and a search function that finds posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
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 medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,000+ conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors can type in a health question and 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 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 WP Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that 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 and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
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