In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your health business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Features
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve your website with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your website.
- bbPress – Use this plugin to set up and manage a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to health apps, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you 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 Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Health Site
Health Plugins For WordPress
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 some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily schedule your event and start receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical use, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD adds 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, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 allows you to display 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 by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise drawings into your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click here:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com