In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With WordPress Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Professionals – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
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 Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and manage your own online social community on your website.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets users report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their comment to the correct person.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
WordPress Medical Or Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical uses, but there are a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets visitors find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can 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 related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,500 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 using video or text, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin 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 – Creating 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 business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes 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 – Lets you easily add recipes to 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click here to continue reading:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)