In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Health Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose 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.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and run an online social network on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] 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 useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical apps, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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 users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Health & Medical Services Site Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins For Health Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule an event and start receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
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 – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin 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 additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays 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 WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts 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 run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise images to your fitness sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
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