In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Your Health & Medical Center Website – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase visitors to your health or medical business generation.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly 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 results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up your own online social network on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section explains how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness apps, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want 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 section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available 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 just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management System
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create an event and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie 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 great 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 lots more
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports 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)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to 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 content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin lets you 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, 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 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 in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type 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)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss health and medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to access Part 3:
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