In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Medical Practitioners – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below 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 (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up an online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports uses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and begin receiving registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is 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 medical-related use, but there are quite a few you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine 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)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin installs a widget on 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 BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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 WP Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from 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 side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
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)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish 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 & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin allows you to display fitness and 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)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we discuss medical and health WordPress themes.
***
This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
Click here to continue:
***
***
"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