In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Health Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your health website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up and manage your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health calculators, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This helps get their comment to the correct person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Health & Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations 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. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin 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 WP allows you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(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, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes 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, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health business presence online.
Click here to continue:
- How To Successfully Build And Grow Your Medical Services And Health Center Web Presence – Part Three
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum