In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your medical business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Your Health Website – Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes that improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness tools, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets visitors provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct area.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of health-related businesses, such as dental practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily set up multiple events and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Management Software)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are many you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
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 shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out to 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 trainer (site 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 many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your sidebar. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that helps visitors find 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This plugin was designed 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 service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about over 14,500 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy 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 – Lets you 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add a database of exercise images to your health and fitness site.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we look at WordPress themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click here to view Part Three:
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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)