In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health business presence online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Services Providers – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
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 using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you set up and manage a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to medical calculators, vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct person.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Health Practice Services Website Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of uses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
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 schedule an event and start receiving registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are quite a number you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And 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)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various 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 Widget)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use to 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 displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 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 can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your visitors 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD adds 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, cite or read 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 is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type 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 For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams inside your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health business online.
To continue, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now