In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Providers In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Your Health Center Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your medical or health-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want 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 choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
Health Or Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and begin processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical usage, but there are a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and 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 a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 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 was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users 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 or blog, 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 text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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 For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type 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 run a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & 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 – Lets you 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business presence online.
To continue, click this link:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)