In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health Services Providers – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors using plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up your own social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section explains how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health apps, free trials, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right department.
Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Health Or Medical Services Website Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practices, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin 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 many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and begin processing registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine 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 Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that 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 WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index 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 that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display 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 Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
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 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets users search posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 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)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at themes for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To keep reading, click this link:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now