In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical or health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Practice Services Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run your own social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical applications, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
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 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right recipient.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily create an event and begin accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso here:
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 supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, 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, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin 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 plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article 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, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, users 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 text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet 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 recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at WordPress themes for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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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