In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical And Health Center Website – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic to your site generation using WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engagement with users
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving general health and diet, access to health apps, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Medical Clinic Services Website Generation
WordPress Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of uses, such as medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily create your event and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss 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 many more
A premium plugin version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 a number of plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to 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 Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets site visitors search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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 website that provides diet and nutrition 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 recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence.
Click here to access the rest of this guide:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum