In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health or medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- 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 SEO)
Other ways to improve your health or medical site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you set up your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also let users report concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right recipient.
Adding Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Medical
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator 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 Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and 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 a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data 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 – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets users search posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content 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 WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
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 interesting 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 simple 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 – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical business web presence.
Click here to keep reading:
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