In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
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
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up a social community on your site.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with others
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health and fitness, access to fitness tools, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Health And Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are a few you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple 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 enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress 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-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
This plugin allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise drawings to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at health-related and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To view Part 3, click here:
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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