In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Medical Practitioners
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Services Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your website with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you set up a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared with new potential clients
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets users send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you plan 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 want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Health & Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and start accepting online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical use, but there are quite a number you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with many additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and 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 users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific data. A basic 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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, create staff listings for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive 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
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, 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 add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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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