In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- A Newbie’s Guide To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and generating more traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display 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
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use 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
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section covers how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with new potential clients
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to medical tools, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct area.
Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more 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 Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, such as dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill 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. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays 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 For WordPress – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget 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 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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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, chat using video or text, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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