In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
This section explains how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- 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 provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with other potential customers
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to health tools, discount coupons, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, 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
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right department.
Adding A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some 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 And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, such as medical practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive 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 with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily create an event and begin receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related uses, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), 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 lots more
A premium plugin version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress 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 additional WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
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)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your 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)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD)
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 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise images to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this detailed guide, we look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence.
Click here to access the rest of this guide:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum