In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For The Health And Medical Profession In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improve Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post 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 engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value content and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health tools, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, 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
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add multiple contact forms into any page or post, 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 else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right recipient.
Map Integration
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If you run medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and begin accepting online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical uses, but there are several you can include in your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A 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 that displays a visitor’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and 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 – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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 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 publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search function that lets users search for posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, service locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(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 drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,000+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your website, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating 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 For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness business that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily add delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy 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. 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 allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise illustrations on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at themes for medical businesses.
***
This is the end of part two.
To continue, 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