In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below 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)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving diet and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, free trials, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set 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 right recipient.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Medical And Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create multiple events and start processing online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health use, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many 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 WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A content editor 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 WP Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors can type in a health question and 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
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin 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, 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 free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials 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 by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings inside your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To continue, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)