In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical-related business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
How To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and driving more traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up and run your own social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical apps, vouchers, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets users send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create an event and begin processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that 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 other WordPress plugins you can check out 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 to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that locates posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site 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 nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- 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 – You can 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)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health & fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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