In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your medical or health-related website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run an online discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to fitness calculators, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to 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 look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog 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 WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 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 gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create 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 own a health or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise illustrations inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we discuss medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to grow your medical business web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum