In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical & Health-Related Businesses In The Digital Realm
- Improving 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 health or medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Your Health Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin lets you run a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many 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
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared with other potential clients
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health apps, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms 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 are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are quite a few you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 drug names are converted 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato 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 gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online 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 are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress 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 and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site visitors 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, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
***
***
"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)