In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Essential Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health Practice Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more traffic with plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s 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)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical tools, vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert 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 also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right area.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily set up an event and begin receiving online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical applications, but there are quite a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your 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 crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
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, service locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read 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 content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will 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 interesting 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 insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(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-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy 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. 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at WordPress themes for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your medical or health business web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)