In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical & Health Clinic Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One 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 SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for engagement with your users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared with others
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness tools, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Readers can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This will help get their message to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(A map 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, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Website With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of medical, health & beauty businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User 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)
This free plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use that 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 a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin can be used to 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 Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets your visitors search posts with specific article data. A 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)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in 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
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, your visitors 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, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will 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)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
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-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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. 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)
This plugin lets you 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)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your health web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum