In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up and run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and plan their trips better
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of health or medical-related businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, 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, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Plugin For WordPress)
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 WordPress plugins you can use to 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, 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 on your site. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
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 site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,000 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors 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, users 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display 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)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)