In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Professionals
- Basic Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
This section will show you ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health and fitness, access to medical applications, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also allows users to send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
WordPress Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar 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 of health or medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin receiving bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), 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 dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version is also available with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in 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 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin adds 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin 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 business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes 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 – 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 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)