In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website 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 use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
This section looks at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Users can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you insert multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins For Medical & Health Businesses
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related uses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments 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 is also available and includes extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related applications, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in 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 enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin 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 other plugins you can check out that 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display 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 – Information Screen)
Information about drugs 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. An editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, users can type in a health question and 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 their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click this link:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum