In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Services Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Professionals
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Health And Medical Services Practitioners – WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic 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.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Health & Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily create multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety 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)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Drug information 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see 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 the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – 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 – Lets you 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your health & fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now