In Part One of this article on ways to build your health or medical-related business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Medical Professionals In The Web Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Grow Your Health Services Website – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic 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 sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and fitness, access to health apps, free trials, access to courses, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows readers to send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This helps visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range of medical, health & beauty-related uses, e.g. medical practitioners, specialists, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – 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. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily create multiple events and start receiving registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides 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 also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health uses, but there are many you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Composition Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for 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 Widget Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed comprises more than 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 for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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 text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will add 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, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your fitness sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your fitness-related websites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this guide, we look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
***
This is the end of part two.
To keep reading, click here:
***
***
"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