In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Opportunities For Health Businesses
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Website’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
An effective way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value content and give them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their comment to the correct destination.
Provide Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Medical & Health Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of medical-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily set up an event and begin processing registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR 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 your site visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 Plugin will retrieve and 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 WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that lets your visitors find posts with specific article data. A basic editor that changes the layout of data in the 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,600 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add 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, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site users 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, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations inside your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue:
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