In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Medical And Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up your event and begin accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health-related usage, but there are quite a few you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
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 WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on 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 check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive 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 to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to 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 – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed includes 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 For WordPress)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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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