In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health & Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic to your health or medical-related site generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- 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 user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up and run a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – 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 with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health and diet, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This helps get their message to the correct recipient.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create an event and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine 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)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on 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 look at 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 trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts 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 Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your 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 a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- 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. 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we take a look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
To keep reading, click here:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum