In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and drive more traffic with WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – 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 SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also lets visitors provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right destination.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Health Website Generation Using Plugins
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health-related businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily create your event and begin receiving bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related use, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional 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 that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets users search posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,500+ conditions and over 26,500 medications 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 via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your 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 health 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 with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your 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 – 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click this link:
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