In Part One of this article on ways to build your health or medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Online Business Tips For Medical And Health Services Providers – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you set up and manage your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- 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
A 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 allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the 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 are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they want to reach. This helps visitors get their comment to the correct destination.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health use, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WP Plugin)
This simple WordPress 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive 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 displays a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
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 – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets site visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
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 experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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)
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 learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your health and fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise images into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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