In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical Professionals
- Essential Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your medical or health website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you run your own social community on your site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right department.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are 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
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create multiple events and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related use, but there are quite a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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 Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add 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, 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your health & fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we discuss medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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