In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Practice Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your health-related website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more 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
- 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 WordPress plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own social network on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the form 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 health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps plan their trips better
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins And Themes
Health Or Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical or health-related businesses, such as medical practices, surgeons, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The 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 sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out that 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – 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 converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor 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 Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(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 collects 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 insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search 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, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams in your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business online.
Click on this link to read Part Three:
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