In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Practice Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your medical-related website using plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own online community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with new potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical tools, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
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 select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the correct person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
Medical & Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily set up multiple events and start accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol 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. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple 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 additional WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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 Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 questions and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(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)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your readers 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 – Lets you 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images inside your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business online.
Click on this link to view Part 3:
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