In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, 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 (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run a social network on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Health And Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to 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 Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed includes 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 plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your site 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
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 or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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