In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – Extending Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Practice Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- 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)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to health apps, free trials, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
WordPress Medical Or Health Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of uses, such as dental practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Manager
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily schedule multiple events and start processing bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more about this go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related usage, but there are quite a number you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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)
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 – Data Results)
Information about drugs 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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
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 WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online 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 work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors 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, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at health-related and medical themes.
***
This is the end of part 2.
To view Part 3, click this link:
***
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)