In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health & Medical Related Businesses In The Digital Realm
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health & Medical Practice Website – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section covers how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct recipient.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some 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
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Services Site Using Plugins
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily create your event and begin processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health uses, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Plugin For WordPress)
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 a number of other 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
***
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya