In Part One of this article on ways to improve your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical & Health Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Businesses
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In Parts Two and Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Capability
- WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your health-related website generation with plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up a social network on your site.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and manage your own online community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with new prospective clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can raise problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress 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 create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps visitors get their message to the right area.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more 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
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Health & Medical Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of uses, such as dental practices, physicians, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily schedule an event and begin accepting registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are several you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage 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 Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many additional 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. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin 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 use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates 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)
MJM Clinic can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
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 own a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss medical clinics and health-related WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
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