In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health-related business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Professionals
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by 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 engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to health tools, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings 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 email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article on Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This plugin 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 plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to 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 – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic 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 WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – 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. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical clinics and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To keep reading, click here:
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