In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Professionals
- Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Online Business Tips For Medical Providers – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical apps, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your website, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports-related uses, such as dental practitioners, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up multiple events and begin accepting online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are quite a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following 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 Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 WP Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
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 online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 using text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin for WordPress 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 better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to read the rest of this article:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now