In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health or medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health-Related Businesses Online
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WP Plugins – Enhancing Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Practice Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is a vital 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 (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress 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 SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this plugin to set up your own online social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your medical or health business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with other potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and diet, access to medical applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical & Health Services WordPress Plugins
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 some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar 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 many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Software For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 receive valuable 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 Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your site visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
The TrendMD plugin will add 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
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 diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise illustrations inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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