In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical or health business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One 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 website’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features on your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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 website
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Health Or Medical Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
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 WordPress allows you to easily create your event and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical use, but there are quite a number you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can use that 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to 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 run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
To keep reading, click this link:
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