In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful 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 and run a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run a community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness apps, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right area.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular 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 Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display 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 WP Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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)
This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 can access insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
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 and make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health & fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)