In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers In The Web Economy
- Essential Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Features
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your health or medical website using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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 (lists all of your posts and pages 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 website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and run an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health applications, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the practice they want to reach. This helps get their comment to the correct destination.
Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and customers can plan their visits better
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins For Health
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and start processing online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are several you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
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 Calculator
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin installs a widget on 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 that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
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 experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that readers 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, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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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