In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Improving Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve 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 search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared with other prospective clients
A proven way to get your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical applications, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- 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 site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Health
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up multiple events and start processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related uses, but there are quite a number you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
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 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 lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets your visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, 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 users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even 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 particular 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
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Custom Post Type 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 own a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise diagrams to your fitness sites.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we discuss WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum