In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
How To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and drive more traffic with WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up your own social community on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up and manage a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value information and offer them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness apps, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct department.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more 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 Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related uses, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index 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, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data 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 – Database Results)
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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,700+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, your visitors can type in a health question and 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 the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating 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 own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish 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 – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we discuss health and medical WordPress themes.
***
This is the end of section 2.
Click here to continue:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org