In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health or medical business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses how to improve your health or medical business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – 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 descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to health applications, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- 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 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else 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 users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical Plugins For WordPress
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 the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services 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 of this plugin is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule your event and start receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. If you are interested in learning more here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health usage, but there are quite a few you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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, 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 For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will look at themes for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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