In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Essential Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your health or medical website using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine 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 search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engagement with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- 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
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This helps visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical site to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software 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 For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that 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 a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets site visitors find posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This 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 forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
TrendMD 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, 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 For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO 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 add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise images into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing medical clinics and health themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click this link:
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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)