In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Your Health Clinic Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, discount coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right destination.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins & Themes
Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, such as dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking 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. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create an event and start processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 additional plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes 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 plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Nutritional Facts 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise illustrations on your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum