In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health or medical-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical And Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health Professionals In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up an online social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase 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 posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical-related business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- 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
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Users can raise concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms 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 to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Health & Medical Center Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily create an event and start processing registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical applications, but there are many you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use 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 trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s BMI
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog 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 and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
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 collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,700 conditions and 26,000+ medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 select a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise illustrations to your fitness sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we look at themes for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
***
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya