In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins that can help to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up and manage a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social sharing features to your website.
(You can add social features to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with high value information and offer them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets users raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right recipient.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some popular 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Health And Medical Clinic Website Using Plugins & Themes
Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is 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 the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are a few you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie 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. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports 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 For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out to 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato WordPress 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 online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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, read or cite 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 posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to grow your health business online.
To continue, click here:
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