In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your medical-related business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Professionals
- Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Services And Health-Related Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your site using plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical or health website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical applications, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users report concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the correct department.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps plan their appointments better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more 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 Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Medical Services & Health Practice Site With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Health Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make a booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration Plugin
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily create your event and begin receiving registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin 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 supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are a number you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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 is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to 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 look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI 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 to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, 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 – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets site visitors search 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, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 gathers and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts 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.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Custom Post Type 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)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert a database of exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business online.
To continue, click here:
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