In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Providers
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Practice Services Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
Web traffic is an integral 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 With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your website.
- bbPress – Run an online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss 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:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they want to reach. This will help get their message to the correct department.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some 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
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins & Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule an event and begin processing bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about 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 provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar 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 that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, 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 the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we will look at themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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