In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- A Newbie’s Guide To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Your 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 Site For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you set up a social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up an online forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared with other prospective customers
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and diet, access to medical tools, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms to your website, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct destination.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health-related businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
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 WP enables you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
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 Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The data is provided by 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 WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create staff member pages for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, users 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 video or text, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health & fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue reading, click here:
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