In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your health or medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up and run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value information and offer them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps 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 Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. 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
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and start processing registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed 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 provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical uses, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress 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 other 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple 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 medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue:
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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