In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Practitioners – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up and run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical tools, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the clinic they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Health And Medical
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
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 many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – 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 lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will 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 interesting 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise diagrams on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum