In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Services
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways to improve your health or medical website using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions 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 Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section will show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also lets users provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right area.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical Or Health Services 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 visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software For WordPress
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin lets you easily schedule your event and start processing online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration System For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are many you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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 – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 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 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 For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 converts common names of drugs to their 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 adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress 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 patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
TrendMD will add 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish 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 and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations on your health & fitness website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
Click here to read the rest of this guide:
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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