In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Medical And Health Services Professionals – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic to your site generation with plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to run your own online social network on your website.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular 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, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. 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 also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create your event and start receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health uses, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine 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 lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various 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 Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress 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 additional plugins you can check out to 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to 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 For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP 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 With the HealthTap Concierge 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better decisions about the food they eat.
(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 Plugin)
If you own 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 publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we discuss health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to build your medical or health business presence online.
To keep reading, click this link:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com