In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Medical Businesses
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Clinic Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal 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 – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to 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, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to health tools, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select which section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct area.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just 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 SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up multiple events and start receiving bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related applications, but there are quite a few you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure 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 Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR 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)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index 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 BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about over 14,500 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress 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, 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 visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary 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 easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we will be discussing health and medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence.
To continue, click this link:
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