In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
- Essential Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Improve 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.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your medical-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run a social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with other potential clients
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness tools, vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let readers provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, 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 option 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 visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Software
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web 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 WP software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health-related use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
This plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 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)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and 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 & 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 – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we discuss health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
To continue, click here:
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