In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress 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 ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health-related business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can raise problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms on your website, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their comment to the correct person.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and clients can plan their trips better
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps 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
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
Medical And Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website 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)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up an event and start processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile 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. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy 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, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful 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 many more
A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at that 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 your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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 and converts common names of drugs 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 add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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 WP Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type 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 own a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers 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 recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise illustrations on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
- How To Successfully Build And Grow Your Medical And Health Center Services Web Presence – Part Three
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group