In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Professionals
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With WP Plugins
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
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 clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This will help get their comment to the correct destination.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create an event and start processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related usage, but there are quite a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports 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 Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor 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)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP 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 experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite 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 is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images inside your content.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)