In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Professionals
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Health And Medical Clinic Services Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search 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 – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared online with other potential customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health applications, discount coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets users report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right destination.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking 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. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User 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 Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress 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 that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots 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 to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
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 Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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