In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Site’s Functionality
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins and themes that can help to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your site generation.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add 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 with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
This section looks at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable content and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, tips for improving health and diet, access to health apps, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This will help get their comment to the correct department.
Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display 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 maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health use, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index 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 Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- 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)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,700 conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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 interesting 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 informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin 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-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we discuss health and medical themes.
***
This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online.
To continue reading, click here:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org