In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Health Providers
- Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress Themes – An Introduction
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
How To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available various plugins that improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic 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)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to run a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their comment to the right area.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings 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. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily create an event and start processing bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you full 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)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin 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 many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various 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 WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read 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 posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 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 consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or 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 over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your site visitors 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- 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 website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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