In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health And Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Practice Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run a social community on your website.
- bbPress – Run your own online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Visitors can raise concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right department.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that 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 plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And 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 For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This 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 experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 – 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 Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise images into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing medical and health themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of section 2.
Click here to keep reading:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org