In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Health Services Practitioners – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving general health and diet, access to health tools, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and begin processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are quite a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
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.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays 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 – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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 the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed contains over 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)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, clinic locations, create staff member pages for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database 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 insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that 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 and make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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