In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Set up an online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to health apps, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient 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 is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right area.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more popular 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of medical-related uses, such as dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple 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 plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what 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 can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, users 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions 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)
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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 business that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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 – Lets you 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams in your web content.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section 2.
Click here to continue:
***
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie