In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical And Health Clinic Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, free trials, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some 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 SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
WordPress Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of health-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If you run health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule an event and start receiving registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (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, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD 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 free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type 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)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health & fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view Part 3, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie