In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Improve Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and generating more web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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 (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you run your own social community on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with other potential customers
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right area.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- 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 WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin 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 with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start accepting bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake 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, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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 that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction 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 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets site visitors search for posts with specific 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 WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as 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 For WordPress)
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 from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that 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, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health-related business web presence.
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