In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Website Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical And Health Clinic Services Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses how to improve your business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install 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 (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section covers ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health calculators, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your 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 additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule your event and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health usage, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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 that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display 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 – Database Results)
Drug information 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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
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 patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,700 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add 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, cite or read 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise images to your fitness websites.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we take a look at medical clinics and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online.
To view Part 3, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)