In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of 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 improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you set up a social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section covers how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with other prospective clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide users with high value content and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to health tools, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct destination.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. It has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
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
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This 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 a number of plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to 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 – 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic 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)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato 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 gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users 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 over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides dietary 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 add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings in your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at themes for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue:
***
***
"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)