In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can help to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your health site.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 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 else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct area.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps plan their trips better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of health-related businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start receiving online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides 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 health-related usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to 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 check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Drug information 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This 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 experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal 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 video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great 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 beautiful recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we will be discussing themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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