In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins
- A Basic Guide To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Health And Medical Services Practitioners – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is an integral part of 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
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s 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 plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health applications, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow readers to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct department.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more 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 And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports-related businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and make an online booking easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule an event and begin processing bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that changes 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato 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 patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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, read or cite 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 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 and make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your health & fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise diagrams on your website.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will be discussing medical themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence.
To keep reading, click this link:
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