In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Professionals In The Web Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social community on your website.
- bbPress – Run an online 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 requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness applications, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your website, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Provide Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Health Site Generation Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and start processing registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, 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 use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This 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 Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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)
If you own a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to build your health web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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