In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Practice Services Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
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 (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and manage a social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to run an online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features on your website.
(You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to health tools, coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to report problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is 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
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you create multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
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 schedule multiple events and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more info, see 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 uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many 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 to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included.
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 Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD adds 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, 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
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 or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- 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 website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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