In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast 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 to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up a social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and run your own online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social sharing features on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- 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 interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to fitness calculators, free trials, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Medical & Health Services Website Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related uses, but there are a few you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily 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. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR 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 displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display 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 – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add 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 – Label Creation)
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 own a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise diagrams in your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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