In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to build your health web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Services Providers
- Basic Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors using plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- 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
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health-related business.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct person.
Map Integration
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online bookings to your site. It provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, surgeons, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many more features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Your Events Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and start receiving bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator WP Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at 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 your site visitor’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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 – 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information to site visitors about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Nutrition Facts 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 and make informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. to your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you add exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)