In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your health-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Features
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving your health or medical website using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to report problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of medical or health-related businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health applications, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie 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 WP Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form 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 Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can look at 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content 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 Plugin)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 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 – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This simple plugin 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 better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- 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 website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click this link:
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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