In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical or health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improve Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search 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 internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available various plugins that improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- 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 engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use this free plugin to run your own social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical tools, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports-related uses, e.g. medical practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and begin receiving bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create 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 is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts 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 Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss medical clinics and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to access Part 3:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)