In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WP Plugins – Enhance Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your business online using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, 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 (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and run a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage your own online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared around with new potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness tools, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
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 – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that 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 other WordPress 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- 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 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 – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets your visitors search posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, 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 online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video 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 select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type 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 run a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site 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 – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise illustrations in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence.
To keep reading, click here:
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