In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health-related business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Your Health Practice Website – WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and run a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives 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 regular opportunities for interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with new potential customers
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable content and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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 users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
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 site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’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 – Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily set up an event and start receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User 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 Widget Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- 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 WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, create staff listings for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
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, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds 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 is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section 2.
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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