In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Center Services Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more traffic using WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section looks at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with new potential customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets users raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin 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 configure and lets you create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up your event and start accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays 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 WP Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 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 can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin adds 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, 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Labels)
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 website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site 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 – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to 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. 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at medical clinics and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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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