In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
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 XML sitemap plugin
- 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-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to health apps, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays 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
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators 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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol 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 Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to 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 other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(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 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)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary 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 publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will look at WordPress themes for medical and health 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 AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum