In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Services & Health Practice Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets 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
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct department.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps customers can plan their appointments better
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This 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 wide range of uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings 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 offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create your event and begin receiving registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat 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. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, 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)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes 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 plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site visitors 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 select a doctor, chat using video or text, 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 WordPress site. 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 For WordPress)
This plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and 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. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence.
Click here to continue:
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