In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins
- WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical Services Practitioners – WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Business Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast 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 to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social community on your website.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness applications, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the correct recipient.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software lets you easily schedule an event and start accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin 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)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health applications, but there are several you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – User 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
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can look at to 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information 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 Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor 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 For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
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, cite or read 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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)
If you run a health or fitness-related website that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search engine optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
This plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click this link:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum