In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Services
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web 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)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run a social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to medical tools, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the clinic they want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps 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 Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just 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. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start accepting registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out to 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.
- 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, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
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 feature that lets visitors search posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from 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 work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will 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 questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings on your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we take a look at medical clinics and health WordPress themes.
***
This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org