In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health or medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Practitioners – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with your users
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to health applications, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Users can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms to 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 also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right area.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps 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 & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and start processing registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A basic content editor 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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
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, cite or read 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 for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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 – 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now