In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Services
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Center Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with other potential clients
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct department.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just 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
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Medical Clinic Site Using Plugins & Themes
WordPress Health Or Medical Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This free plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content 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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as 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)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related 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 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
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 and make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create 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)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we will look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie