In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s 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
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives 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 user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with new potential clients
A proven strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress 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 Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a range of medical or health-related businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, 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
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin lets you easily set up your event and start processing online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health use, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A basic content editor 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 WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD 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, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your health and fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your content.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)