In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available various plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up an online social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to get your visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health applications, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for 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 create and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps 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 & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online 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. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create your event and start receiving bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health applications, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And 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 For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, 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 converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets site visitors search for posts with specific data. A simple 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 can access valuable insight about over 14,500 conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health or medical web presence.
Click here to access Part Three:
***
***
"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now