In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and driving more traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up your own forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section explains ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with high value content and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical calculators, free trials, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Health And Medical Services Site
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical, health and beauty uses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This 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 them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The data is provided by 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, 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 embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 gain insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, 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 video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add 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 and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click here to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now