In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical And Health Services Professionals – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you run your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms to your website, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps plan their trips better
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health use, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), 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 Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed 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 the following 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)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, 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)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD 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 WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we discuss WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To continue, click this link:
***
***
"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