In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Providers
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and run your own social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, coupons, 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, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular 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
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are quite a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 additional plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts 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 Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your site visitors 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
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, cite or read 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 is a free WordPress plugin that 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 and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)