In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Practice Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your medical-related business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you set up your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engaging with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with others
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Users can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some 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 SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
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 – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to 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 responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and 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 Plugin – Information Screen)
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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets your visitors find posts with specific data. A 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 Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed 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 conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 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 consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, users 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, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site 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 – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you 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)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at medical themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of section two of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health or medical web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
***
***
"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