In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Essential Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Web Site With Plugins
- A Basic Guide To WordPress Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical And Health Practice Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores how to improve your health or medical-related business online using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to health tools, coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct person.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
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 users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up an event and start receiving registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their 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 information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database 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 gain insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(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, 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 Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts 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 Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials 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 Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we take a look at medical clinics and health themes.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence.
Click here to keep reading:
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