In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Health Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social features to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to health tools, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct destination.
Map Integration
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Health & Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily set up an event and start receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, 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.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 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 Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included.
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 For WordPress)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your 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 their question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress 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 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 visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business presence online.
Click here to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now