In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you 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 by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run your own online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users something for free in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health and diet, access to health applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the clinic they want to reach. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right department.
Provide Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical-related businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and start processing registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related use, but there are a few you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat 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. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR 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 your site user’s 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their 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 lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains 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)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical 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 26,500 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
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health business web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now