In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health or medical business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Professionals
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up an online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to run a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared online with others
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to health applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct person.
Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and start receiving online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related use, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
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 WordPress plugins you can use that 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
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)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic 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 services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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 Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors 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, 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Labels)
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 run a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your health business online.
Click on this link to read the rest of this guide:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum