In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Services Professionals – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and driving more web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One 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 SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and manage a social community on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can raise problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health uses, but there are a number you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that 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 additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets users search posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin 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 run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that 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, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your health-related business online.
Click here to access Part Three:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum