In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Professionals
- Essential Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Contents
- Tips For Health Professionals – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins & Themes
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Medical Website Generation
Tips For Health Professionals – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up your own forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with new prospective customers
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages 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 site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something 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 prospects can select the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right area.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Medical Website Generation
Health And Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
Go here for more info: Booking Calendar
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this: How To Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
Go here for more details: Calculators Pro WP Plugin
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
Go here for more information: Calculated Fields Form
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
More information: Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 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 your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
More info: Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Go here for more details: Drug Interaction Data
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
More information: PubMed Posts WP Plugin
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, go here: MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,700+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress plugin: Treato Plugin For WordPress
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
Visit this website to learn more about using this plugin: HealthTap Concierge
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
Visit this website to learn more about this plugin: TrendMD
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
Go here for more information: WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering 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. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
Go here for more details: WP Ultimate Recipe
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
More info: Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings inside your web content.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more information, go here: Exercise Images Plugin
In part three, we look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business web presence.
To continue, click here: Online Business Tips For Health Services Providers – WordPress Themes
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Recommended WordPress Plugins And Themes:
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