In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Professionals
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots 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.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use 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
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up and run a social network on your website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with new potential clients
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness applications, coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Health & Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, 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. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health-related applications, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to 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 (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted 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 publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 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 doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your visitors 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This free plugin 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
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 or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials 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
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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