In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Basic Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Functionality
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Clinic Services Website – Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section explores how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic with plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run a social network on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular 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 That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related uses, such as medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, 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 – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule your event and begin receiving bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker 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 enter 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 BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable 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
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise images to your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your health or medical business online.
To keep reading, click this link:
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