In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Professionals
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and run a social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own online discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social features to your site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health-related business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This helps get their message to the right recipient.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins For Health
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create your event and start processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are a few you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form 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 many more
A premium version is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin that lets you add a widget to 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 use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and 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 – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, 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 and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A 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 Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic 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, service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,500+ conditions and 26,500+ medications 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 who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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 select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add 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 towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides 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 healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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 – 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we will look at themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to continue reading:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum