In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve your medical 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 sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up and run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct recipient.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
Health & Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports uses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
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 posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health uses, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
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 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 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)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, your site visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin 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 WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
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 or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search 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. 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your health-related web presence.
Click on this link to view the rest of this guide:
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"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