In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Features
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Your Health Website – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins and themes for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To 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 a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to run a social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value information and give them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets 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
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you add multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and clients can plan their appointments better
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create an event and begin receiving online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information 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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets site visitors search for posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
PubMed includes over 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)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even 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 over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)