In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Professionals – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, 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
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with other prospective clients
An effective way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right destination.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- 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 Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins And Themes
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily create an event and start processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is 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.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake 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)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
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 Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable 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 via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise images in your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click here:
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