In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Essential Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Blog’s Capability
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Services Practitioners – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, tips for improving general health and diet, access to medical tools, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Users can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right destination.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- 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 Generate More Traffic
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily set up your event and begin processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate 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 Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create 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
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog 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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes 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)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical or health web presence.
Click here to view Part Three:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now