In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health-Related Businesses Online
- Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One 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 (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, tips for improving health and fitness, access to health tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and start processing online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related use, but there are a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at to 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 admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that finds posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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)
This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or 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 using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add 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, 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 free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers 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, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
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