In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Essential Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more visitors using WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your health website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and manage your own online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the correct department.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some popular 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
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
Health And Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and 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 displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates 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, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, your site 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert 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 better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise diagrams into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence.
Click here to keep reading:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)