In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers In The Digital Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, 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 engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress 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 health or medical-related 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 WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run your own social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This 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 features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we will discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to fitness tools, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right area.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display 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 With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Medical And Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
This free bookings plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WP enables you to easily set up your event and start processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create 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 version with additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their 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 information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
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, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin 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 select a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD will add 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, 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise diagrams to your fitness websites.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss WordPress themes for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2.
To continue, click this link:
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