In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical-related web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health & Medical Clinic Services Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’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 sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you run a social community on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we’ll show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with others
An effective way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical apps, free trials, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This helps get their message to the right destination.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more 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
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up your event and begin receiving online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 other WordPress plugins you can look at 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we discuss health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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