In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical-Related Businesses In The Digital Realm
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improve Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your health website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use 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 for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to set up your own online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to health calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
WordPress Plugins For Medical And Health Businesses
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports-related uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create an event and begin processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical uses, but there are many you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, 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. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein 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 dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 – WordPress 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 Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets site visitors search 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 WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you 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
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This 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 from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to improve your health business web presence.
Click here to view the rest of this guide:
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