In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers In The Web Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Practice Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
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 Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features on your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct department.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Or Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports businesses, such as medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily set up your event and start accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin 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 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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version is also available with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
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 your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in 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 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you add 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating information, 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 add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health & fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss WordPress themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health web presence.
To view Part 3, click here:
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