In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Providers – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
An effective strategy for getting visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health and diet, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right area.
Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Medical Business Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Health & Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical, health and beauty businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
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 WP lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
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 – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following 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)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin 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)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about over 14,700 conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the 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 using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create 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 – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your medical web presence.
Click here to continue reading:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)