In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health Providers
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Health And Medical Clinic Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health apps, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This will help get their message to the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real 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 site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that 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 and make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering 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 – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise diagrams on your health and fitness websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related business presence online.
To view Part 3, 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