In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health And Medical Firms Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to set up and run a discussion forum on your website.
- 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 WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health apps, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create multiple contact forms to your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related businesses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences 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 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition 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 publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health and fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence.
To view Part 3, click here:
***
***
"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