In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capability
- WordPress Themes – An Introduction
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Services Website – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins and themes that can improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up your own social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct destination.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical, health & beauty-related businesses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin 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 provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 a number of other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- 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 inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets site visitors search posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients 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 the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds 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, read or cite 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – 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)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click this link:
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