In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health And Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose 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 – Create the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- 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 engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer 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 entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets users provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct destination.
Adding Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and plan their appointments better
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Health And Medical Services Website With Plugins And Themes
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practices, specialists, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you 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 multiple events and begin accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for health applications, but there are a number you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. 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 supports 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 Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that lets users search posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
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 read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2.2 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 doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add 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, 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that your site users 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)