In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins and themes that can help to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your site generation.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some useful WordPress 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 site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with new prospective customers
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to health tools, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets 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 website
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports-related uses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run 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 create multiple events and begin receiving registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate 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. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form 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 many more
A premium version is also available and includes many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 your site user’s Body Mass Index
- 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 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 – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, clinic locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will 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, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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