In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Health And Medical Services Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your health-related site with plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to 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 to your website.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users something for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to medical tools, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is 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
- Convenient for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the clinic they want to reach. This will help get their message to the right destination.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients 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 & Themes That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Health Or Medical Services Business Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical, health and beauty-related businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight 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
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for 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 Plugin)
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 a number of WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO 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 health & fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your health & fitness websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we take a look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your medical web presence.
To view Part 3, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum