In Part One of this article on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Medical Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Health And Medical Services Professionals – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up and run your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical applications, coupons, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to report problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right department.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of health-related uses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule your event and begin accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health usage, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional 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 trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see 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 can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
This plugin lets you insert exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
Click on this link to continue:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group