In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services
- Essential Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capabilities
- WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin helps you set up and manage a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
This section explains how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health applications, discount coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct destination.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Medical Or Health Services Site
WordPress Plugins - Health & Medical
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is great for creating 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 with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create staff listings for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what 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 receive 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 Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD will 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, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we discuss medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this step-by-step article on ways to build your medical business web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)