In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical-related business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Center Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve your health-related website using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives 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 offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health applications, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and helps clients can plan their trips better
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress 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 use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets users search for posts with specific 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 For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create staff listings for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, your site 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your readers 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 and preview button, 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
Click here to continue:
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