In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
How To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social network on your site.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with new prospective customers
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health applications, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just 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
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Medical Or Health Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start receiving online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- 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 entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin adds 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, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your medical business presence online.
To keep reading, click this link:
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