In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Medical Services Practitioners – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
An effective strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the right department.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display 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 Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Medical And Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site 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 your post content 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 WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 can access valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting 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 is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings on your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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