In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure 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 article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create 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 – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health tools, vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their message to the right recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding a map 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 helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
Health & Medical – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you plan to run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin accepting registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin 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 Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content data.
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)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, service locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,600+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(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, 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WP Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site 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 – 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you insert exercise diagrams into your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health-related businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to improve your health or medical-related business online.
To view the rest of this article, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)