In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Functionality To Your Web Site With WordPress Plugins
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors with WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- 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 known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we will discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical applications, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces 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 page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps customers can plan their appointments better
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- 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 Generate More Visitors Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins - Medical Businesses
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or 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 create your event and start accepting bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your 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:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are many you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate 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 Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that 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 other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
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 to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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 valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View 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 allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise drawings to your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your health web presence.
Click here to read the rest of this article:
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