In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improve Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your website generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can 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 site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared with new prospective customers
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- 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 Visitors With Plugins
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of medical-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin 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 WP software lets you easily create multiple events and start accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health applications, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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 displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 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 real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, users 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 using video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you 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, 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 free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling 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 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 recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your health and fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to access the rest of this article:
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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