In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your medical-related web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Health & Medical Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with other potential customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness tools, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
Medical Or Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related uses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
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 for WordPress lets you easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form 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 plugin version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out to 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 your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
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 Plugin)
This plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress 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 patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about over 14,000 conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
TrendMD lets you 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, cite or read 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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 Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at themes for medical and health-related businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, 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