In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Business Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Services & Health Center Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to entice visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is 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
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize the 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 plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the clinic they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct department.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display 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 SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your 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 is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie 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 WP Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and 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 lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display 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 – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online 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 Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health web presence.
To continue, 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