In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical & Health Practice Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness applications, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right area.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical & Health Services Website
WordPress Plugins - Medical Services
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add 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)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets your visitors search posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will add 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, 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 Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence.
Click here to continue:
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