In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
How To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user 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 sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up and run a social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
A proven way to entice your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical calculators, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Users can raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, 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 to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct recipient.
Provide Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and clients can plan their visits better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Health And Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of medical, health and beauty-related businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and begin receiving online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical applications, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, create staff listings for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read 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 content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, users 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
This plugin will add 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Nutritional Facts 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 or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to keep reading:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum