In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Features
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up and manage a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up an online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to fitness tools, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving 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 website
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms on your website, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their comment to the right area.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many 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 on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,700+ conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website or blog, your 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin lets you 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating 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 run a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss themes for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view Part Three, click here:
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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)