In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your health or medical-related 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 a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we will show you how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with other prospective customers
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value content and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical tools, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the correct person.
Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you 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 begin accepting registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are quite a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker 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 enter 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple 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 other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets your visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, clinic locations, create staff listings for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
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 from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 run a health or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams in your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we take a look at medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your health-related web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
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