In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health applications, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces 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
- Convenience for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health Site Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule your event and start accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. If you would like to know more about this here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
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 WP Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content.
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 For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, 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 experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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 – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, users 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This 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, 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your 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, live custom formatting, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise illustrations inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to continue:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)