In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your medical website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast 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 (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase 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:
- BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up an online social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and manage your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical applications, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Medical & Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
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 software lets you easily create an event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical use, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 converts common names of drugs to their 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 content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in the 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 WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in 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 over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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. 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to read the rest of this guide:
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