In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health or medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors with WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage your own social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven way to entice visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health apps, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows readers to raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient 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 free plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct area.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more 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 And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Health And Medical Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, such as dental practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web 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 lets you easily set up multiple events and begin processing online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are a number you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein 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)
This free plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific data. An 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,500 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD will 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, 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Label Creation)
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 nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise images to your health & fitness website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we discuss themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to view the rest of this article:
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