In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One 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 site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, 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 visitors to raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will look at themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To keep reading, click this link:
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