In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to get your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical applications, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to 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
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more 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
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up multiple events and start receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
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. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health uses, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
This free plugin 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 plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
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 online 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 26,000+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make more informed 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 run a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your health & fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise drawings in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
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