In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Professionals
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve 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 article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by 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 SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and manage your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- 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 a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms to your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right area.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily 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. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays 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 – Results)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
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)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs 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 receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- 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 & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section 2.
Click here to keep reading:
***
***
"I love the way your email series "Infinite Web Content Creation Training Series" is documented and presented. It is very absorbing and captivating. The links and tutorials are interesting and educational. This has motivated me to rewrite my content following the concepts I am learning from the email series." - Mani Raju, www.fortuneinewaste.com