In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Professionals
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Health And Medical Services Professionals – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- 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 Web Traffic Generation
Medical And Health Services 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 users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of medical-related uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up your event and begin accepting bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related uses, but there are a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 run a health or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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