In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- 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 to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up an online social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared online with new potential clients
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let readers report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms to your website, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Adding Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Software
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create your event and start receiving registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related applications, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and 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 your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, create staff listings for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your health & fitness websites.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at medical clinics and health themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health business web presence.
To keep reading, click here:
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