In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Medical Services Providers – WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores ways to improve your health or medical website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you set up your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engaging with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving general health and fitness, access to medical apps, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct person.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors 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 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 SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Medical
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of health or medical-related uses, such as dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and 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 side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, 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 over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds 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)
This free plugin lets you insert 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 For WordPress – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
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 business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise images to your health & fitness sites.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your health web presence.
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