In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Providers
- Online Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Basic Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Center Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase 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 on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health and fitness, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let readers provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- 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
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the clinic they want to reach. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct person.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Health Or Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and begin accepting bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
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.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) 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. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin 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 website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- 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, before and after photos, etc. to your health & fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click here:
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