In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Clinic Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up and run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared online with other prospective customers
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving health and fitness, access to medical tools, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health Website With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Health & Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up your event and begin processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article on Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical use, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets users search for posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This 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 receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users 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, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 For WordPress)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your health & fitness website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health business web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum