In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical & Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Services Professionals – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses how to improve your website using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up an online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up and manage a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their comment to the correct recipient.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start processing registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the 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 WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form 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 Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- 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 Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the 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, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat 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 based upon their location and type of question, they will receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin 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, 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to continue:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org