In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available various plugins that improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
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 website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and manage a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to health calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, 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 visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want 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 ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Medical Services
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily set up an event and start processing registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical applications, but there are quite a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use that 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays 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 can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets users search for posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 receive insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health-related web presence.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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