In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical Providers – WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Website
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your 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 to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this free plugin to set up and manage your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to run your own online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features on your site.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to health apps, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers raise concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms to your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their comment to the correct person.
Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of health-related businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health uses, but there are quite a number you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP 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 WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets your visitors search posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in your post content 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD will add 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 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 is a free WordPress plugin that 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 in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – 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 or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that your site users 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, 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 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 allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now