In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Essential Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health & Medical Services Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set 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 article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic 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 XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up and manage a social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own 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 – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with other potential clients
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to 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.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospects can select which section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right recipient.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health Services Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create your event and begin receiving online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health-related uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can use 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 trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content.
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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin 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 WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site 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 – 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will look at medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to read the rest of this article:
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