In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Web Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up your own online social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage a community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to 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 WordPress plugin to add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we’ll show you how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health tools, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right area.
Add A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running 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 begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce 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. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin 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 plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
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 Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video 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 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Labels)
This plugin 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 or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users 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, live custom formatting, 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. 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise drawings in your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
***
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)