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 topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Features
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Services & Health-Related Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(You can add social features to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with 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 you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to entice your visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
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 medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the right area.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health use, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User 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 BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise drawings into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online.
To continue reading, 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