In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Opportunities For Health Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Functionality
- WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve your health-related website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health business.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health apps, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the right destination.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps 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 Generate More Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of medical, health and beauty uses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site 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 more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create your event and start accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical use, but there are quite a few you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your website 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 responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- 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 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 Plugin – Database 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 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create staff member pages for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic 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 receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type 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 Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish 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 – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click this link:
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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