In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Health Services Site
Health & Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of medical, health & beauty-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and start processing online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website 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 use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI 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 a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets users search for posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, your site 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, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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