In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health-related business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Services And Health-Related Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up your own social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to health applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct person.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical usage, but there are several you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version with additional 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 Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to 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 (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to 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 – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed comprises more than 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 for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even 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 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}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Labels)
This plugin 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 or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom 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}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue reading, click here:
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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