In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical & Health Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- 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 SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
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 (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
An effective strategy for getting visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms to your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right area.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Medical
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical-related uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up your event and start processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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 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 more
A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free 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 Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering 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 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes 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 that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,500 conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, users 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, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you 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, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts 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)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence.
Click on this link to access the rest of this guide:
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