In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical-Related Businesses In The Digital Realm
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores ways of improving your business online with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health applications, coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and clients can plan their appointments better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Health And Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
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 just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of health or medical-related businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar 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 notifications. The plugin 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 additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
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 create your event and start accepting online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related use, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And 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)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP 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 see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,700 conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will 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 the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin will 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, read or cite 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)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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 or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical or health-related business presence online.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)