In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Medical Center Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your medical business online using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your health website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social community on your website.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
This section explains how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to medical tools, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
Medical Or Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical or health-related businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily create an event and begin receiving online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health usage, but there are many you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss 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, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(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 plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- 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 for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. It also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and read 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 over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your medical-related business web presence.
To continue, click here:
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