In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical & Health Services
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Practice Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you set up and manage a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving 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
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of uses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
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 Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple 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 additional WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change 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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and 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 forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin 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 or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized 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, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your health & fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise illustrations in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
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