In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Capability
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Clinic Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your 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 useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared with other prospective clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to health tools, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can choose the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This will help get their message to the correct person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Health Services Professionals
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of medical-related uses, such as dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use that 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets users search posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users 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 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will 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)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise images to your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health-related business online.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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