In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Health & Medical Clinic Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore how to improve your website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web 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 XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run your own social network on your website.
- bbPress – Use this WordPress plugin to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness apps, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let visitors raise concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically 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 WordPress plugin lets you easily create your event and start receiving online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are a number you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a widget to 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 check out 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 your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
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 WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see 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 can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users 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 using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
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 increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 run a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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