In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, 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
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engaging with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting your visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The 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 notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress 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
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health applications, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
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.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
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 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, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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 WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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 Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors can type in a health question and 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 a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and 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. 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 WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click this link:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com