In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Basic Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to 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.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter 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
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Users can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of medical-related uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up multiple events and start receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein 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)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also provide 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 is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to 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 – 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific data. A basic 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)
This plugin was designed 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 WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your health and fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to grow your medical-related web presence.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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