In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your medical or health-related website generation with WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to 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 – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will display 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 allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install 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
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s 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. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical apps, vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct department.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical applications, but there are a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein 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)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 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 real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin 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-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence.
Click on this link to continue:
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