In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Health Practitioners – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and manage your own social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you set up your own community forum on your site.
- 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 engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health apps, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Visitors can send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right recipient.
Add A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Health And Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily create an event and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat 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. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
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 additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display 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 For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple clinic locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,500 conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your site 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD lets you 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 own a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- 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. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now