In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Professionals
- Opportunities For The Medical And Health Profession In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up your own online discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make a booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User 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)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to 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 to 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
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 WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related 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 are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your 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 a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To keep reading, 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