In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
- Basic Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Practice Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to run your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness tools, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces 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 visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create multiple contact forms on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This will help get their message to the correct area.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most 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, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar 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 wide range medical, fitness and sports uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
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 – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Drug information 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress 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 collects 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 can access insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ 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 Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD will add 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)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)