In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health & Medical Firms Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical & Health-Related Businesses Online
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Services Providers – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- 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 select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps plan their appointments better
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- 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 WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Or Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of medical or health-related uses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create your event and start receiving bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display 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 – Database 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic 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, clinic locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about over 14,700 conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. 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 based upon their location and type of question, they will receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your 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 – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise illustrations on your health & fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
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