In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available various plugins that will improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to 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 site using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health-related website to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up an event and begin receiving online registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health-related applications, but there are many you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version is also available with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that 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 plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- 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 can be used to display 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)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in the 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 WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, 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 questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise illustrations to your health & fitness site.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we take a look at themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
Click here to view Part 3:
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