In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you run your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your 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 highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared around with other potential customers
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right department.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create multiple events and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. 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 provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets your visitors search for posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes 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)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD 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, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress 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)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, 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 and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – 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 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)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise illustrations inside your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we will look at medical themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of section 2.
Click here to continue:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org