In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical And Health Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic to your medical or health website generation using plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and run your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Set up an online forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
This section will show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving fitness and well-being, access to medical calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers send feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their comment to the right recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and customers can plan their appointments better
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most 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 For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
Booking Calendar lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, fitness & sports-related businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
Booking Calendar works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version is also available with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily set up an event and start processing registrations literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
Go here if you want to learn more managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for medical applications, but there are several you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities is also available.
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. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple BMI Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data 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 drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes over 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)
The MJM Clinic 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, multiple service locations, create staff listings for doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about 14,000+ conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts, pages and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related website that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise images into your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss medical and health themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health or medical business web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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"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