In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and generating more traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set 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 posts for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up a social network on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will help get their comment to the correct destination.
Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of health or medical-related uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticket Registration System
(Manage Your Events Automatically With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up an event and begin receiving online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 a number of WordPress plugins you can use 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, based on age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 14,700+ conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, users 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you 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, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise drawings to your site.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we look at WordPress themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
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