In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Professionals
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search 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 (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up and manage a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with high value content and give them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the right department.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Health & Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up your event and begin receiving registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical usage, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- 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 will retrieve and 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 WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(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, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will 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 interesting 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 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish 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 & 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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"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