In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Providers In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health Practitioners – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your medical-related business online with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with others
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical tools, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
Medical Or Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of medical, health and beauty businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings quickly and 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. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related applications, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users 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, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your health-related business web presence.
Click here to keep reading:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)