In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Practice Services Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic using WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One 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 SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run an online social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with new potential clients
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to medical tools, discount coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- 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
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you create multiple contact forms to your website, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This helps get their message to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(Maps help 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 Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Medical & Health Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create multiple events and start accepting online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
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 widget that locates posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 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 – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD 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, read or cite interesting 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 is a free WordPress 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 in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise diagrams to your fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com