In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical business presence online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Professionals
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Health And Medical Services Professionals – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and run your own online social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical apps, free trials, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google 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 Generate More Traffic With Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Medical
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily create an event and start processing bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical use, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports 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 WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic 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 services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about over 14,500 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your 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 the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds 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, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, 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)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
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