In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore how to improve your health-related business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, 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 make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Software
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical applications, but there are a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to 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 look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
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 WP Plugin)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,700+ conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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)
If you run a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your 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 and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical clinics and health themes.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to read Part Three:
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