In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Firms Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical And Health Services Practitioners – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve your business online using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up a social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to health applications, discount vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Users can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can choose the section of the center they are contacting you about. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps plan their appointments better
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation With Plugins
Health & Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule your event and start accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content 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)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin 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 or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise images inside your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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