In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses In The Online Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social community on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health and diet, access to health tools, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This will help get their comment to the right area.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule your event and start processing online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Software)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Data Results)
Drug information 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content 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)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your site visitors 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 over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we look at health-related and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
Click on this link to keep reading:
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