In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Providers
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress Themes – An Overview
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores ways to improve your medical business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- 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 create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health apps, coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right destination.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Medical Or Health Services Website Generation Using Plugins
Health Or Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical, health & beauty-related businesses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule an event and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI 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 other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress 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 gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 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)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, your 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site 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 – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that site users 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, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical clinics and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to build your medical business web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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