In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical And Health Services Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up and run a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with others
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to fitness applications, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces 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 page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the practice they are contacting you about. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Medical Services Site Generation Using Plugins
Medical And Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will 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)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. If you would like to learn more about this here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in 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 logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Plugin)
This free plugin 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 mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus 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 includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical 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 WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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 Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that readers 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise drawings to your health & fitness-related website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click here to continue reading:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum