In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Features
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation using plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
This section looks at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] 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 highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness applications, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of health or medical-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and start receiving registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete 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:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are a few you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie 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 – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 check out that 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 (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs 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 WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, 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 search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we take a look at medical themes.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business web presence.
Click here to continue:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum