In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Health Center Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins and themes for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your health website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) 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 Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value information and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct department.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical Or Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A simple 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 to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
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 written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, 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 visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 over video or text, or send questions and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and 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. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we discuss medical and health themes.
***
This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to access the rest of this guide:
***
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com