In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Areas covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you run your own social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up a discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your health business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with other prospective customers
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to fitness applications, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their message to the right destination.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
Medical & Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your medical website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range medical, health, fitness & sports uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Management
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web With Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If you plan to run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily schedule multiple events and begin processing online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management System)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed application that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, VO2 Max 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, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that 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 provides support for various 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 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 Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets site visitors search for posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content data.
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 Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, clinic locations, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, users can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress 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 Plugin)
This simple plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Nutritional Facts 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 run a health-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that your site visitors 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, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your fitness sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
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