In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Health & Medical Services Website – Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways to improve your medical website using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you 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 for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section covers ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Medical And Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of medical-related uses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily set up an event and begin accepting online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical usage, but there are a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
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 forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert 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 – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors 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, 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)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise illustrations on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
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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