In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Functionality
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WP Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Professionals – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve your business online using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up an online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section explains ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical apps, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can choose which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right area.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Medical Services Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
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 – 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat 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 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors can type in a health question and 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 and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress 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 – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations on your site.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
***
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie