In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
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 sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up and manage an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to health applications, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the correct person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Services And Health Practice Site
WordPress Health Or Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and start processing registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful 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 more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that 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 other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, 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 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 add posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 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 was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see 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 gain valuable insight about 14,700+ medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. 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 receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
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 own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie