In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Services Providers In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to set up and run an online community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven way to entice your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, free trials, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Readers can report problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct recipient.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Medical Clinic Site
Medical Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports-related uses, such as dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin processing online registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version is also available with many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. 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 the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index 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, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets site visitors search for posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included.
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 Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, multiple clinic locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable 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 Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress website, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD 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 interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Labels)
This plugin 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 nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to improve your health business online.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)