In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Services And Health-Related Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
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 sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run an online social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared with new potential clients
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical apps, vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- 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 With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of uses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start processing online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to 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 (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 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 Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets your visitors find posts with specific data. A simple content editor 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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato 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 online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence.
To continue, click this link:
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