In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information 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.
Grow Your Health Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can add social features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
An effective way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right recipient.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Medical Or Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical-related businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
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 for WP enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article on managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various 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 lets you add a widget to your website 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 use 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by 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 crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 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 versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
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 experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,500+ conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health-related business presence online.
Click here to keep reading:
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