In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Clinic Services Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send 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 site.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health tools, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is 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 site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so users can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct area.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins 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
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create an event and start receiving bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from 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 work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, your visitors 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin 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 website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise diagrams into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part two of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
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