In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and driving more visitors.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve 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:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness apps, coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let users provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing 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
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right person.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
Medical Or Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software enables you to easily create multiple events and begin receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features.
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 – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This simple plugin for WordPress 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 additional plugins you can use to 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets users search posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress 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 from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,700 conditions and 26,600+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 run a health or fitness-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create 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, 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we discuss medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue reading, click this link:
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