In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Essential Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section we will show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with other prospective clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with information of high value and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily set up your event and begin accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related uses, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This plugin 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 a number of plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR 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, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 WordPress Plugin – 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato 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 collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This 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, 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 Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to 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 – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your health and fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your health business web presence.
To continue, click here:
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