In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Center Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve your health or medical business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With 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, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social network on your site.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up an online forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and begin accepting bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related use, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to 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 For WordPress – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical 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 Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at medical clinics and health-related themes.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical or health business web presence.
Click here to continue:
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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)