In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Medical & Health Profession
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Services
- Essential Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 & 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health or medical-related website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health apps, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Users can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct department.
Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of businesses, such as dental practices, physicians, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email 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 with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP software enables you to easily create an event and begin processing online bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
To learn more about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related applications, but there are several you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – 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 BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget)
This free plugin installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site 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 many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Database Results)
Information about drugs 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related 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
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your visitors 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, chat using text or video, or send questions and get answers using the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – 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, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add 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 – Custom Post Type 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)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, 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)
This plugin allows you to showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your website.
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 illustrations to your website.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we discuss themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your health-related web presence.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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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