In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Health Practice Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – 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 article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you run your own social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section we’ll discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- 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
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let readers raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Medical And Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient 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 WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 BMI Calculator Widget)
This free plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets your visitors search posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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 plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato 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 gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,600 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
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition 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)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- 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 – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your health & fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
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