In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capabilities
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
How To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right recipient.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related use, but there are quite a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- 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)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- 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 Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content 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 Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create staff member pages for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD will add 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 – WordPress Plugin)
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 in a standardized format and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create 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)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy 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 – 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 showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your health & fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss themes for health and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
***
***
"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum