In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Services And Health Practice Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run a social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with new prospective customers
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- 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
- Convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, 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 you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Health Services Providers
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and start processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Labels)
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 or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site users 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, 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