In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your health website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- 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 create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, free trials, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more 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
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and begin processing online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health usage, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting 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 retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
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, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, 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 using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you add exercise diagrams to your health and fitness-related site.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical and health-related themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum