In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Providers In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Services & Health Center Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your medical or health website with WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure 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 article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors 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 XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let users report problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of health or medical-related businesses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up an event and start accepting bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on 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 look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- 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 age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets 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 clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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. 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)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health-related web presence.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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