In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Services
- Essential Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Medical Professionals – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes that improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- 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
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and clients can plan their trips better
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers 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
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins For Medical Providers
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up an event and start receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to 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 mobile-friendly 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 that displays a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting 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 for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 – WordPress 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 data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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 WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, users 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin adds 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP 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 more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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 For WordPress)
If you run a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your health & fitness website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at medical clinics and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to build your medical business web presence.
Click here to continue:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)