In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health Services Providers – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run your own social network on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to get your visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical tools, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right destination.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more 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
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of uses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking easily. 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 and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily create an event and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake 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)
This plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that 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 check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, your site 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, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD will add 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
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 business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- 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 and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise images into your web content.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will look at health-related and medical themes.
***
This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business web presence.
To keep reading, click here:
***
***
"I love the way your email series "Infinite Web Content Creation Training Series" is documented and presented. It is very absorbing and captivating. The links and tutorials are interesting and educational. This has motivated me to rewrite my content following the concepts I am learning from the email series." - Mani Raju, www.fortuneinewaste.com