In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Professionals
- Essential Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Services Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below 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)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and manage your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for enticing visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical tools, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Medical And Health Center Services Site Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up your event and start accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health use, but there are a few you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your sidebar 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 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 a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress 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 inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by 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 function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, 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 your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, 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. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to access Part 3:
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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