In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
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:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical & Health Services Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Website Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to entice your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps plan their appointments better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many 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 for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple clinic locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
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 collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge 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 text chat or HD video from any mobile device, 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 own a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & 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 – You can 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we take a look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to grow your medical business presence online.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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