In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your health or medical-related business online with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health apps, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set 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 will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Medical Services & Health Center Business Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 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 medical or health-related uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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 – Information Screen)
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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds 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 Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we discuss medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your health business web presence.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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