In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health-related web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical & Health Firms Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to health tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Users can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Adding Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients 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 For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily create multiple events and begin receiving online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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)
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 – Database 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable 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
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, users 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD adds 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
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 run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish 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 and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health web presence.
To keep reading, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)