In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Providers
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Health And Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your website using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins & Themes
Medical And Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of health-related uses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health applications, but there are a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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 Body Mass Index
- 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users 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 With the HealthTap Concierge 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert 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 Plugin For WordPress – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click this link:
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