In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Professionals
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that 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 sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section we show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It 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
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select the section of the center they want to reach. This will help get their message to the correct department.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps plan their trips better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical & Health Services Site With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports-related businesses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With 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 schedule your event and begin accepting bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out that 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets users find posts with specific data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 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 can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato 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 patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ 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 consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site visitors 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 over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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 Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
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 run a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to build your health-related web presence.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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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