In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation using plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine 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 (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you run your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up and run a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness applications, vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can raise problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health applications, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to 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 trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
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 Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets users search posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and 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 insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin 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, 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 add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display exercise drawings inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to continue reading:
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