In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical Services Practitioners In The Online Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section discusses how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site with plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own online social network on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and offer them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness applications, vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the correct person.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps plan their trips better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular 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 Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins For Medical Or Health Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting businesses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and start receiving registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
Calculated Fields Form is useful for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at 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 trainer.
- 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 lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that finds posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin installed, your visitors 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you own a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part two.
To continue reading, click this link:
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