In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health or medical business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Services
- Essential Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Clinic Services Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic to your business generation using plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engaging with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with new potential clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their comment to the correct destination.
Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Medical Services & Health-Related Business Generation Using Plugins & Themes
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar 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, fitness and sports uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations 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 email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin 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. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate 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, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information 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 For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets your visitors search 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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
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 run a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display a database of 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 be discussing themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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