In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section explores ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your medical or health website with WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and run an online social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of 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
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health or medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule your event and begin accepting online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 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 designed for health-related uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can look at that 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 (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays 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 Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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 WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your visitors 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 video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add 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 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 learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum