In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With WP Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Medical Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with other potential customers
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to report problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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 very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration System
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily create your event and start accepting bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), 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 forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This simple plugin lets logged-in 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 Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This free plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate 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 Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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)
This plugin 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 Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 WP Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add 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)
This plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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 – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we discuss health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum