In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Medical And Health Firms Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Professionals
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Medical Providers – WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage your own social community on your site.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
This section covers how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health apps, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right destination.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and helps customers can plan their visits better
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Medical & Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health 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 For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make online bookings easily. Site 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 plugin version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create your event and start accepting registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related applications, but there are quite a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that 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 a number of plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data 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 Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the 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 creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets users search posts with specific data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 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 plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
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 your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you add 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 informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise images on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to read Part 3:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group