In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical & Health Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Website – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your site generation with plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health-related 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.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical applications, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health Center Services Website With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule an event and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete 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 about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health use, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein 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)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and 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 – Database Results)
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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
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 to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
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, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your health & fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise drawings inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click this link:
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