In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health And Medical Firms Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Businesses
- Essential Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with new potential customers
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress 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 Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical & Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management System
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related usage, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting 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 will retrieve and 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 – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by 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 publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets your visitors search posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD adds 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
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 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 healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and 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 – Lets you 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise images inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at WordPress themes for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
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