In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 & 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: WordPress medical and health plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that improve your medical or health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast 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 SEO)
Other ways to improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving general health and nutrition, access to health calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms 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 else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the section of the clinic they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. It has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, specialists, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with many extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Automatically Using Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up an event and begin receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are many you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight on given dates. This data is 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 Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Database Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic – WordPress Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, multiple service locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
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 your site visitors can search a vast drug database and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 valuable insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across 14,700+ medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
This plugin will add 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 scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish 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, live custom formatting, 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise drawings into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we will look at medical and health WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your health-related business online.
Click here to continue reading:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)