In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For The Medical And Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Health Center Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your health website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up and manage a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- 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 offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to get your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness tools, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Visitors can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
A 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 post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct destination.
Provide Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range of health-related uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule your event and start processing online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related usage, but there are many you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Body Mass Index 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.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at that 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 trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – 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 WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see 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 receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Custom Post Type 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 diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise diagrams into your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we discuss health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to build your health business web presence.
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