In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Center Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared with new potential clients
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Health And Medical Services Site
Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related uses, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, create staff member pages for therapists/doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 26,600+ 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 – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, your site 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your 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, 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)