In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your health business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your health website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical tools, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms to your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct destination.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Medical & Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health-related site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment bookings to your site. It provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many extra features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up your event and start processing bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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)
This free plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many more features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are 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)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly 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 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 inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple clinic locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about over 14,700 medical conditions from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – 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 – WP Plugin)
If you run a health-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers 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, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your health & fitness websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2 of this guide on ways to improve your medical or health business web presence.
To view Part 3, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group