In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Essential Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health & Medical Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’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 some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own social community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form 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 adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which section of the center they are contacting your business about. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right destination.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides users with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related use, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple 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 BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress 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 experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site visitors 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 over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 run a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business presence online.
To continue, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)