In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Services Professionals – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- 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 medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Visitors can report problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is 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
- More convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right destination.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
Health Or Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments 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 with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create your event and begin processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 For WordPress – 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, 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 you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your health and fitness websites.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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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