In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical or health business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Providers In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your website with plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to fitness tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many 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
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right department.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. You can learn more about this here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This free plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their 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 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 inside your web content, 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health and fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your health web presence.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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