In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health & Medical Professionals
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Features
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WP Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social community on your site.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin 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 health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can select which section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This helps visitors get their message to the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health Website With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Health And Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up an event and start accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
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 Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI 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 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
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)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at medical and health-related themes.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical web presence.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now