In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Features
- WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Services Providers – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available many plugins that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage your own online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can report concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several 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
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of medical, health and beauty uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services 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 additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health 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 an event and begin processing registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following 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 BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering 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 can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences 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 consumers to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will 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, 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)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts 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 run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise drawings in your content.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we will look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health web presence.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com