In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health & Medical Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capability
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Services Professionals – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress 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 your medical-related site’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 some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases 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 features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right department.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and customers can plan their visits better
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers 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
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Health Or Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. 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 version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and start accepting online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog 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.
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 lets your visitors search for posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create staff member pages for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – 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-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click here:
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