In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine 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 (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Run your own online discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section explains ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical tools, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct area.
Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Health Or Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of medical-related uses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up an event and begin receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI 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 displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. The data is provided by 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 publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A basic content editor is also included.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts 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 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin lets you 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 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 WordPress plugin that 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 – Creating Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to 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. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your fitness websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed article, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click here to access the rest of this guide:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)