In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your medical-related business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section explores ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more traffic using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors 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
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social community on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress 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 to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin 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 – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and begin processing online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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 For WordPress)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 a user’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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to 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 WP Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you display exercise illustrations on your health & fitness sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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