In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic with WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we will show you ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical or health business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable content and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else 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 select the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right destination.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily set up your event and start accepting online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
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 pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin 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 additional plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to 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 Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets users find posts with specific data. A simple content editor 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 WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients 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 over 14,500 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin 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-related business that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now