In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic with plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Software
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and start receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are many you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays 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 For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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 Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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 using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add 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 recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise drawings to your fitness website.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will be discussing themes for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business presence online.
Click here to access the rest of this article:
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