In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Services Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors 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 sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as 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 website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social sharing features on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical applications, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Medical & Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up your event and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Learn more about this here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress 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 additional WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 (admin).
- 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, based on their 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 Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, 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 WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, your site 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, 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 WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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