In Part One of this guide on ways to build your medical-related web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Set up your own online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical tools, coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select which section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct area.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health Services Site Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins - Medical And Health
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes a ton of extra 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 data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin 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 WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 a user’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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets users search posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 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 consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
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, 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To continue reading, click here:
***
***
"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum