In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Providers – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes that can improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you set up a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with your users
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
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 more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 additional WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering 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 for WordPress will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical 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 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
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 HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, users 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we look at themes that are suitable for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related web presence.
Click here to read Part 3:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie