In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health-related business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Professionals
- Essential Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part 3.
Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving your health or medical-related website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health calculators, vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct recipient.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more popular 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical or health uses, but there are many you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting 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 drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type 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 run a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish 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 – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert exercise images into your web content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will look at themes for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to build your health-related web presence.
To keep reading, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie