In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Professionals In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Services And Health Clinic Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add 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 display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run your own social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- 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 new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health applications, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
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 medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the right person.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help 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 SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins - Medical And Health Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create an event and begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting 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 Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Information about drugs 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
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 Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating 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)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to 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 – Lets you 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your health and fitness site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will be discussing medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business online.
To continue reading, click this link:
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