In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For The Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more visitors with plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One 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 SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your site’s 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 powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to set up and run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with other potential clients
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- 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 page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can choose which section of the center they want to reach. This helps get their message to the correct area.
Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins & Themes
Medical Or Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily schedule an event and start accepting online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator 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 calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search function that finds posts with specific data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, multiple service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This 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 experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will add 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)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily 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 your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings on your health & fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we discuss health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click this link:
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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)