In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Health and medical plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section covers how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with information of high value and give them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness applications, coupons, membership access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so users can select which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct area.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration System
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP lets you easily create multiple events and start accepting online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator 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 a number of other WordPress plugins you can look at that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
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.
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, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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 from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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 choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD WP Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and 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 WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise drawings into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at WordPress themes for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your health business web presence.
Click on this link to keep reading:
***
***
"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