In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health or medical business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Center Services Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up a social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value information and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to medical calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient 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 to your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the correct area.
Add A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins 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 Traffic Generation
WordPress Medical And Health Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many 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)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
This simple plugin for WordPress 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 additional plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and 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 shows your 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)
This plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your pages and posts, 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 publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed includes over 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 to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
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 or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious 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 – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting 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, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you display exercise images in your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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