In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Professionals
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Medical And Health Services Professionals – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- 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
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with other prospective customers
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving 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
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right recipient.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and helps customers can plan their trips better
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 BMI Calculator)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use that 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in 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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create staff member pages for therapists/doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
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 related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, 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 WP Plugin – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"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)