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 …

16+ WordPress Plugins That Can Grow Your Medical Or Health WebsiteIn Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your medical or health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:

  • Online Challenges For Medical And Health Services Professionals
  • Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
  • Improve Your Web Pages
  • Improve Your Web Content

In Parts Two and Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.

Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:

  • Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
  • Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
  • WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors

Useful Information

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:

Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.

How To Improve Website Traffic

Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your medical or health-related website with WordPress.

Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress

There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:

  • SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
  • Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
  • Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
  • Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show in search results.
  • Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
  • Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
  • Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.

Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.

For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:

Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO

(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)

Other ways to improve your medical-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:

  • BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
  • bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your website.
  • E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
  • Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
  • Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.

WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins

(You can add social sharing to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)

Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications

Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.

Adding A Newsletter

Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:

  • Drives targeted traffic to your website
  • Keeps readers from forgetting about you
  • Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
  • Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
  • It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
  • Increases user engagement
  • Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content

An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness apps, vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.

Contact Forms

Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.

A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:

  • Reducing spam
  • Automated response
  • Giving you control over what is sent to you
  • You can keep your email address private
  • Contact forms can be added to any page or post
  • Improves the professional look of your website
  • Convenience for visitors

One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 WP Plugin

(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)

This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.

International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.

Another feature 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 users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the correct recipient.

Adding A Map

Maps help your visitors and customers find you.

Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:

  • They increase local SEO
  • Visitors can easily find you
  • Displays location of events

Maps help your visitors and customers find you

(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)

Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:

WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation

Medical Services Plugins For WordPress

WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:

Booking Calendar

Booking Calendar - WordPress Plugin

(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)

Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of uses, such as medical practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.

Booking Calendar Plugin - Overview

(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)

This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software

Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP

(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)

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

The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily schedule your event and begin processing bookings in just a few minutes

Event Espresso

(Event Espresso)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.

We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:

Calculator Pro Calculators

Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin

(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)

Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization

Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:

  • Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
  • Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
  • Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
  • Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
  • Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
  • Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

Calculated Fields Form

Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress

(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)

Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:

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

A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.

For more details, go here}:

Weight Loss Tracker

Weight Loss Tracker

(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)

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

Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin - Graph

(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – 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

Simple BMI Calculator Plugin

(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)

This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:

  • BMI BMR Calculator  A Body Mass Index 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 Body Mass Index
  • Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
  • And lots more

For more details, go here}:

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

Drug Interaction Data

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)

This plugin 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 - Database Results

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)

Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

For more details, go here}:

PubMed Posts

PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin

(PubMed Posts)

PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.

PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.

For more details, go here}:

MJM Clinic

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin)

MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.

For more details, go here}:

Treato

Treato Plugin For WordPress

(Treato)

This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online 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 are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

HealthTap Concierge

HealthTap Plugin For WordPress

(HealthTap WP Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service.

For more details, go here}:

TrendMD

Trend MD - WordPress Plugin

(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)

TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 Plugin For WordPress

(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)

This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.

WP Nutrition Facts - Nutritional Facts Label Creation

(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)

WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

WP Ultimate Recipe

WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin

(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)

If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.

Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.

Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:

  • Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
  • EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom 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

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)

Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your health & fitness site.

For more details, go here}:

Exercise Images

Exercise Images - WordPress Plugin

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)

Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise diagrams into your posts and pages.

Exercise Images WP Plugin - Image Catalog

(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)

For more details, go here}:

In the next section of this guide, we take a look at medical themes.

How To Build And Grow Your Medical Clinic Services Business Online Using WordPress

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This is the end of part two.

To continue, click this link:

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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com

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