In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use this plugin to set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase 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 features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something 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 select which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and customers can plan their visits better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress 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 Visitors Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health-related website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily create an event and begin accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running 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, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed contains 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)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign 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 your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & 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. 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now