In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- A Basic Guide To Understanding WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve your medical-related business online using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your site.
- bbPress – Run 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 – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving general health and diet, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is 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 website
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Site With Plugins
Health And Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings 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 booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR 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, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and 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 – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used 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 WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type 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 or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings in your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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