Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2

This is part 2 of our series on growing a medical or health-related business online and provides a comprehensive list of WordPress plugins suitable for medical or healthcare-related businesses …

18+ WordPress Plugins That Can Help Your Medical Or Health BusinessIn Part One of this article on ways to build your medical or health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:

  • Online Challenges For Health And Medical Businesses
  • Opportunities For The Health Profession In The Web Economy
  • How To Improve Your Web Pages
  • Ways To Improve Your Web Content

In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.

Topics covered include:

  • Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
  • Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
  • How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins

Useful Info

To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:

Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.

Your Medical Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins

Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.

Optimizing Your Website For SEO

There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health or medical website for search engines:

  • SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
  • Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
  • Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
  • Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
  • Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
  • Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
  • Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.

How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.

For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:

Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website's SEO

(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)

Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):

  • BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
  • bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up your own online discussion forum on your website.
  • E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
  • Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
  • Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features to your posts and pages.

You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive plugins

(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using WordPress plugins)

Generating Leads & Enquiries

In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.

Add A Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits, like:

  • Sends targeted traffic to your site
  • Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
  • Provides practical tips and advice
  • Provides a targeted marketing channel
  • Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
  • Increases user interaction
  • Provides another way for readers to share your content

An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.

Contact Forms

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.

Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:

  • 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
  • Is convenient for users

A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)

This free plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.

Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct destination.

Provide Maps

Maps help your visitors and customers find you.

Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:

  • A map helps to increase local SEO
  • Helps visitors find you easily
  • Shows location of events

A map helps your visitors and clients find you

(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)

Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:

Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes

Plugins For WordPress

WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

Booking Calendar - WordPress Plugin

(Booking Calendar)

Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.

Booking Calendar Plugin - Overview

(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)

This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available with many additional features.

For more details, go here}:

Event Espresso

Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin

(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso For WordPress)

If you run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and start processing online bookings literally in a few minutes

Event Espresso

(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.

Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:

Calculator Pro Calculators

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators)

This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization

Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including the following:

  • Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
  • Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
  • Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
  • Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
  • Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
  • Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

Calculated Fields Form

Calculated Fields Form Plugin

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)

The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:

  • Health & Fitness Calculators
  • Ideal Weight Calculator
  • Pregnancy Calculator
  • Calorie Calculators
  • And lots more

A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

Weight Loss Tracker

Weight Loss Tracker - WordPress Plugin

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)

Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.

Weight Loss Tracker - User Graph

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)

The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.

For more details, go here}:

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress

(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)

This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at 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 site administrator.
  • BMI / IMC Calculator  A simple calculator that displays your site visitor’s BMI
  • Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
  • And many more

For more details, go here}:

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)

Drug Interaction Data 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 Plugin For WordPress - Data Results

(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)

Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 - WordPress Plugin

(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. It 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 Plugin For WordPress

(MJM Clinic WordPress Plugin)

MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.

For more details, go here}:

Treato

Treato

(Treato)

Treato WordPress plugin 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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 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 - WordPress Plugin

(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.

With the widget installed, users 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.

For more details, go here}:

Trend MD

Trend MD - WordPress Plugin

(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)

TrendMD will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

WP Nutrition Facts

WP Nutrition Facts Plugin

(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)

WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.

WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin - Creating Labels

(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)

This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

WP Ultimate Recipe

WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress

(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)

If you own a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.

Other WordPress recipe plugins include:

  • Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
  • EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
  • ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
  • And many more.

For more details, go here}:

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)

This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.

For more details, go here}:

Exercise Images

Exercise Images by Everkinetic

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)

Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise images into your content.

Exercise Images by Everkinetic - Database

(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)

For more details, go here}:

In the next section of this detailed article, we take a look at medical and health WordPress themes.

The Ultimate Guide To Successfully Growing A Health Clinic Website With WordPress

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This is the end of part two of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your medical or health web presence.

Click on this link to continue:

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Originally published as Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2.