In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Services
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Providers – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your medical or health website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you set up your own social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can easily add social features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section will show you ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to health applications, vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers raise concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right area.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Health Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health-related uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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 dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
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 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 For WordPress)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 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 Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add 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 – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your website.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click this link:
***
***
"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)