In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more visitors.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your medical or health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to health calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More 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)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical And Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar 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 email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create your event and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database 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 can access 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 Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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