In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health or medical business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Grow Your Medical & Health Practice Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared with new prospective customers
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for improving health and nutrition, access to health apps, vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct destination.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical Or Health WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily schedule your event and start receiving bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical usage, but there are quite a few you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content 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 can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato 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 collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, your site visitors 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 over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise images inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2.
To keep reading, click here:
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