In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your medical-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
How To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving your health business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to run a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to medical tools, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- 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 website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right department.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help 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
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Medical & Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive 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 is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related usage, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 your users their Body Mass Index
- 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)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and 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 the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting 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 insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish 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 search optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise images into your content.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
- The Ultimate Guide To Building And Growing Your Health & Medical Center Business Online – Part Three
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie