In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Services
- Improving Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical And Health Services Practitioners – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and manage a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Health & Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily create your event and begin processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides 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
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical use, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports 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 WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about over 14,500 conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 own a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we look at themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum