In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Opportunities For The Medical And Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical And Health Services Professionals – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up and run your own social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and manage your own online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, free trials, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let users send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives 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
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right recipient.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin 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 Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed contains 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)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress 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 collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, users 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 questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, 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)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health business web presence.
Click here to continue reading:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)