In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health Professionals
- Basic Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- A Newbie’s Guide To Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your medical website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use this plugin to set up and manage a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This will help get their comment to the correct recipient.
Add A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website 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
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Medical & Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso WP 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 WordPress software enables you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are a number you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking 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, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User 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 BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
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 a number of WordPress plugins you can use 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 a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
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 to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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