In Part One of this article on ways to build your health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health And Medical Profession
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Web Economy
- Essential Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section explores ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation with plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your medical or health website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up an online social network on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up and manage your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with new potential customers
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to health applications, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This helps visitors get their message to the correct destination.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Medical Services And Health-Related Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site 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 provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Event Bookings 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 WordPress software allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. If you would like to know more about this here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical applications, but there are many you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine 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 – WordPress Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with a ton of extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a free plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are 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 that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The data is provided by 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
PubMed includes 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)
This versatile plugin was designed for clinic 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, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin 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 gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,000 conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with 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, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
This plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two of this article on ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Click on this link to continue:
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