In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Health And Medical Center Services Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more traffic with WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up and run your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to health apps, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular 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 Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins For Medical Services
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make online bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create an event and start receiving online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can look at 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets your visitors search posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online 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 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
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 run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise diagrams to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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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