In Part One of this article on ways to grow your medical or health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health And Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health Practice Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation with plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- 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 (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up and run a social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health calculators, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct destination.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Health And Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up an event and start receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake 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)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin 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 more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin will retrieve and 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 – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and 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 valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin 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, 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)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating 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 or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to keep 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