In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores how to improve your website using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own social community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving general health and nutrition, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation Using Plugins
Health Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical, health & beauty-related uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin accepting registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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 WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
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.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Information about drugs 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that finds posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 WordPress Plugin)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
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 own a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, 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 Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click here:
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