In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health & Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two and Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Improving Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and manage a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you set up and run your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This helps get their comment to the correct destination.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below 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
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Health & Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, such as medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily create an event and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
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 For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific data. A basic 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato 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 related 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
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site 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 text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to 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 – 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 For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings in your web content.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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