In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up your own social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also lets users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- 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 a free plugin that lets you create multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
Health Or Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site 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 Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments 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 supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and start receiving registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create 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 with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets visitors search posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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 WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, create staff member pages for consulting practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato 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 experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at medical themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health business presence online.
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)