In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Functionality
- WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section explains how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with others
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let visitors raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right department.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just 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 and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily create multiple events and start processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, 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 periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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 displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A basic 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,000+ conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors can type in a health question and 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 questions and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin lets you 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Label Creation)
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 or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence.
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