In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your 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, comments, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with valuable content and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness tools, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct destination.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- 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 Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for 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 simple plugin for WordPress 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 WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
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 and converts common names of drugs to their 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets site visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress 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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your website.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum