In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- Understanding WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Services And Health Center Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin receiving online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and 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 Plugin – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
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 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD 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, 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)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- 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 and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical-related web presence.
Click here to continue:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group