In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your medical or health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Functionality
- A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors using WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email 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 health center or medical clinic is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right department.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map 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
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
WordPress Health Or Medical Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version with many extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticketing Registration System For WordPress
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and begin accepting registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed software that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical use, but there are quite a number you can add to your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And more
A premium version is also available with a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
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 Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
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 Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that lets visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
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)
This versatile plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, clinic locations, create service/therapy listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what 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 posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD WordPress 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Custom Post Type 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 website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes that site visitors 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 – Lets you 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise images into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we discuss WordPress themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to grow your health business online.
Click on this link to continue:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum