In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Health & Medical Center Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you set up and run a social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, 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 professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the right area.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related use, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add 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, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at medical and health-related themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence.
To continue, click this link:
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