In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Services Professionals
- Essential Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your site using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to 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 increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social sharing features on your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe is to provide users with valuable information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical applications, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
WordPress Plugins - Health
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
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 software enables you to easily set up your event and begin processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate 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. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed contains over 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 on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,500+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your health & fitness-related site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health or medical business presence online.
To view Part 3, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)