In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your medical or health-related website using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal 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 as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site
Medical And Health – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical or health-related uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create your event and begin processing registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health applications, but there are many you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight 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 that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for 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 web content. 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets users find posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 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 can be used for clinic 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 services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,700+ conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss WordPress themes for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
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