In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Improve Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions 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 provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use this WordPress plugin to run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to health tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This helps visitors get their message to the correct destination.
Adding Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. 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. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs 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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific 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 WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
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 site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients 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 the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or 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 the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin 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-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your health and fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you display exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online.
To continue, click this link:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)