In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Functionality
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast 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 called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and run your own online social network on your website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to health applications, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct destination.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are 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 For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins For Health & Medical Businesses
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works 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. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin accepting registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical applications, but there are quite a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can use that 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,500 conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin 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)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
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 run a health-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors 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 and preview button, 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images on your fitness site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your health or medical web presence.
Click here to view Part Three:
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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