In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Services Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can help improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up your own online discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to medical calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to report concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports-related uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up an event and start processing online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function 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 WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,000+ conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
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, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your visitors 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you 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, cite or read 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 add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin 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 website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we take a look at medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
To keep reading, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum