In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses
- Essential Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve your business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your medical website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast 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 (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up and manage a social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
This section explains how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right department.
Add A Map
Maps help 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 increases local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here 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 That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical-related businesses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run 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 begin receiving online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
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 more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display 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 as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets your visitors search posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 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)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
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 gathers and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,700 conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, users 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 their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD 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, cite or read 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 – Lets you 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we take a look at medical and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group