In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Providers
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Website – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your medical-related website using plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
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 (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to run your own online social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and manage a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section we will discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engaging with users
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with other potential customers
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to health applications, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request 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 is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are 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
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- 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 will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed includes 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 versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group