Author: WP Compendium

In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:

• Challenges Professional Health Services Practitioners Face Online
• Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
• Your Web Pages
• Tips On How To Improve Your Content

In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related business online.

Areas covered include:

• Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
• Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
• WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation

To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:

• Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With WordPress Plugins
• Understanding WordPress Themes

Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.

Your Medical & Health Clinic Services Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins

Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.

Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress

There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:

• SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
• Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
• Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
• Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
• Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
• Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
• Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.

How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.

Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:

• Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
• WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin

(A plugin like Yoast SEO 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, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on your site.
• bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up and run your own forum on your WordPress site.
• E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
• Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
• Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons to your site.

(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)

How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries

Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.

Provide A Newsletter

Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:

• Drives targeted traffic to your website
• Keeps readers from forgetting about you
• Keeps readers updated
• Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
• Increases interaction
• Provides another way for subscribers to share your content

An effective way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health applications, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.

Provide A Contact Form

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.

A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:

• Reducing spam
• Automated response
• Giving you control over what is sent to you
• Allows you to keep your email address private
• They can be added to any page or post
• Improves the professional look of your site
• Convenient for site visitors

A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7)

Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.

International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.

Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.

Map

Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.

A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:

• They increase local SEO
• Visitors can find your office more easily
• Show location of events

(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)

Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:

• Google Maps
• Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
• WP Google Maps
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation

Health & Medical Services – WordPress Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:

Booking Calendar

(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)

The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.

(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)

This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.

For more details, go here}:

• Booking Calendar Plugin

Event Espresso

(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)

If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create an event and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes

(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)

Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.

We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:

• Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)

Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.

Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical use, but there are a number you can use, including:

• Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
• Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
• Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
• Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
• Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
• Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro – WordPress Plugin

Calculated Fields Form

(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)

This free plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:

• Health & Fitness Calculators
• Ideal Weight Calculator
• Pregnancy Calculator
• Calorie Calculator
• And lots more

A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.

For more details, go here}:

• Calculated Fields Form

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker)

This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.

(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)

The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.

For more details, go here}:

• Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin

Simple BMI Calculator

(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)

Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 site administrator.
• BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
• Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
• And lots more

For more details, go here}:

• Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data)

Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)

Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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}:

• Drug Interaction Data

PubMed Posts

(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content 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}:

• PubMed Posts WP Plugin

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.

For more details, go here}:

• MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin

Treato WordPress Plugin

(Treato Plugin For WordPress)

Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in 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 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

• Treato

HealthTap

(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.

With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.

For more details, go here}:

• HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin

TrendMD

(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)

TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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}:

• Trend MD Plugin

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)

This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better decisions about the food products they purchase.

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)

WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin

WP Ultimate Recipe

(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)

If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.

Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:

• Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
• EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
• ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
• And many more.

For more details, go here}:

• WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)

Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.

For more details, go here}:

• Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)

This plugin lets you display exercise illustrations on your website.

(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)

For more details, go here}:

• Exercise Images Plugin

In part 3, we will look at health and medical WordPress themes.

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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health business presence online.

To keep reading, click here:

• Your Medical Center Website – WordPress Themes

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