In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical Professionals
- Basic Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage an online social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some 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
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Medical Or Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports-related uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run 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 multiple events and begin processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display 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 – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that changes 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 over text or video, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to 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 Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to view Part Three:
***
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group