In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Essential Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Improve Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic to your health or medical-related website generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- 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.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
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
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use this plugin to run an online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to fitness tools, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email 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 medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct recipient.
Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display 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 Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Medical & Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, 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 book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake 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)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets users search posts with specific data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 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 valuable insight about over 14,500 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
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 own a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users 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, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your fitness-related website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
***
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group