In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health & Medical Clinic Services Website – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation With WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s 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 to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health apps, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives 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
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins & Themes
Health And Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings 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 website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily create multiple events and start receiving bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical usage, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets your visitors search for posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic 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 Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
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, 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 is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we discuss health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your medical or health web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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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