In Part 1 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 And Medical Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Essential Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Areas covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Features
- WordPress Themes – An Introduction
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
How To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more traffic using plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and run your own social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engaging with your users
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 lets you add multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the center they want to reach. 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.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more popular 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 For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range of uses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User 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 Widget – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows 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 for WordPress will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 the 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 posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that finds posts with specific data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,500+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 nutritional or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your health & fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at themes for medical and health businesses.
***
This is the end of section two of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health or medical web presence.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
***
***
"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum