In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Services Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up an online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical calculators, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation
WordPress Health Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, such as medical practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and 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 offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your website 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 check out 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data 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 – WordPress Plugin – 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 and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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)
This plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical 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 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, your visitors can type in a health question and 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 their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD WP Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Nutritional Facts 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)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise images inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we will look at themes for medical and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum