In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more traffic with plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up and run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to 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 website.
- Floating Social – Easily 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 with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with high value content and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers report problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps plan their trips better
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule your event and begin processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test 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. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. 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 supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This 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 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 over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site visitors 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 over video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will 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, 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering 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 – 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)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your health and fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we take a look at WordPress themes for health-related and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to continue:
***
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie