In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- Understanding WP Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health And Medical Center Services Website – WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- 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 images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to entice visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A very 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 lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Medical Site Generation
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and start processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
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 Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out that 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 (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
This plugin will 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, 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings inside your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to improve your health business web presence.
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