In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to run your own online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can easily add social features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with other potential clients
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical tools, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right area.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular 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
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health use, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie 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, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports 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)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your 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)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you 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
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users 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, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations in your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business presence online.
To keep reading, click this link:
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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