In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Online Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and manage a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health-related business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with new potential clients
An effective way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical tools, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right area.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using 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 lets you easily schedule multiple events and start processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health use, but there are quite a few you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin 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 other plugins you can look at that 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, 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, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- 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, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams in your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we look at medical clinics and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business online.
Click here to read the rest of this article:
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