In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives 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 site
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right area.
Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily set up your event and start processing online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 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 service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise images into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we take a look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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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