In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health Services
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical And Health Services Practitioners – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with valuable content and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to medical tools, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This will help get their comment to the correct area.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Medical And Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical uses, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use that 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in 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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related 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 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your site visitors 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 over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
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