In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with your users
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and give them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to health tools, vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This plugin is well supported, has an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of uses, such as medical practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online 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 supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version with extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress enables you to easily create your event and start processing online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin will retrieve and display drug information, 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 inside your web content, 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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes 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 Plugin For WordPress)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,500+ conditions and 26,500+ medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 website that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & 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. 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 WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise illustrations on your fitness website.
(Exercise Images – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we take a look at themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie