In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase 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 pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the mail 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 medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Medical Practice Website Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free bookings plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and begin receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health-related uses, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage 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, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in 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 Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes 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)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your website.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click here:
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