In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Essential Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your medical or health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Users can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right destination.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily create an event and begin accepting online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related applications, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User 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 BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin 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 other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display 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)
Drug information 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information on health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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 Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to read the rest of this article:
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