In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Digital Economy
- Essential Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Clinic Services Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features on your website.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to health apps, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the clinic they want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
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 With Plugins
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related site to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, fitness & sports businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with many additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Management Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software allows you to easily set up your event and start receiving online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content.
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 WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, your site 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 lets you add 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts 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 – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise diagrams in your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
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