In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Professionals
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Health Practice Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
An effective strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Readers can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct recipient.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical, health and beauty-related uses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and 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. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily create your event and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR 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)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and 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 – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 converts common names of drugs to the 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, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains 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 plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
This plugin 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 nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss health and medical themes.
***
This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue:
***
***
"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