In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
How To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use this free plugin to set up and manage a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section looks at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness applications, coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also lets visitors raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins & Themes
Health And Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and 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 offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health usage, but there are many you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss 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 Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Widget Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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 plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
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 you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD 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 insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue reading:
***
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com