In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health or medical web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Health And Medical Center Services Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you set up a social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness apps, vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many 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
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right person.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports-related uses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create multiple events and start processing online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate 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, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on 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 retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
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, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers 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, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, 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 using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
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, read or cite 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- 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, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your fitness site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to access the rest of this guide:
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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