In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- 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 things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to fitness apps, free trials, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms to your website, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
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 SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and start accepting online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein 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)
This plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at to 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- 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 For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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 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}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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 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 is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin 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 website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at WordPress themes for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
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