In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Site With Plugins
- WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic
Your 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 Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable information and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets users raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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 visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms 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 want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps 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 Plugins & Themes
Medical Or Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily create multiple events and begin accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their 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)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,500 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(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, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type 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)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This 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 by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise images to your fitness site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health web presence.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)