In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Providers
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Clinic Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set 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 article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value content and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail 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 medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right department.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
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 Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are a few you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- 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)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- 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 for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Results)
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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content 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)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and 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 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add 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, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create 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)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we look at themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical business web presence.
To continue, click this link:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now