In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we explore how to improve your website with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content 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 a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your medical site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up a social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we show you how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to entice your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several 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
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the email 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 visitors can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right area.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily set up your event and start processing online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are quite a few you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to 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 check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many 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 information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets site visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create staff listings for therapists/doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 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 – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site 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 – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise images to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical clinics and health-related 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 AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum