In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Site With Plugins
- A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
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)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up and run a social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Run your own online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct person.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are a few you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- 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 entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data 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 Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that changes 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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to continue:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)