In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health-related business online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Businesses
- Opportunities For The Medical & Health Profession In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your health website using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that 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 website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you run your own social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section covers how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with other potential clients
An effective way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else 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 select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the correct area.
Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
Medical Or Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgeons, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and begin receiving registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. For more details, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health applications, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index 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, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets users search posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
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 WP Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress 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 from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain 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 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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 particular topic. They can then select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read 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 for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress 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)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that readers 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, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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 Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
Click here to access Part Three:
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