In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your medical or health-related business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Professionals
- Opportunities For Medical Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Your Health Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up an online forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value content and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let visitors provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right destination.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Medical Or Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily create your event and start accepting registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical usage, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out that 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 (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to 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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets site visitors search for posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, create staff member pages for doctors/therapists and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato 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 patient experiences 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 over 14,500 conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite 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 is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & 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)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view Part Three, click here:
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