In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Health Services Providers – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter 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 user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages 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 page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct recipient.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more 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
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works 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 supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 a user’s 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 Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
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 for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
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 gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,000 conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and 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 – 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise images inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss medical clinics and health themes.
***
This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
Click here to access Part 3:
***
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)