In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes that improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more visitors to your website.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO 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 some more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with new potential customers
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide users with content of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on 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 to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule your event and begin receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are a number you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake 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 Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities 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 Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – 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 and drug names are converted 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 add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what 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 the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site users 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise images inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now