In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your business online using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- 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 allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up and run a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to run an online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical calculators, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms to your website, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Medical And Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create your event and begin accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health use, but there are a few you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato 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 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 insight about the side effects of over 26,500 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 Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create 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 business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss themes for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
***
This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
***
***
"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum