In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to run your own forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health and fitness, access to medical apps, discount vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want 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 select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right area.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of health-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily create an event and begin accepting online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User 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
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that 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 other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of 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 WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, 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. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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, read or cite interesting 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 WordPress plugin that lets you insert 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 – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we will be discussing health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue reading, click this link:
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