In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Providers In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your medical business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use 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 (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with others
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information 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 health tools, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Health And Medical Clinic Site
Health Or Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin accepting bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin 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 additional plugins you can look at that 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 that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 For WordPress)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
This plugin 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 run a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your health and fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your medical-related web presence.
Click here to access Part Three:
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