In Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast 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 website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section explains how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health applications, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- 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
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily schedule your event and start processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control over the 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)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
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 a number of plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- 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 more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your 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 the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed contains 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 versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
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 medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more 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 With the HealthTap Concierge 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we discuss health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical web presence.
Click here to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now