In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Health Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health Practitioners
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Functionality To Your Website With WordPress Plugins
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Website Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore how to improve your health-related website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up and run your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical apps, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This will make sure that visitors get their comment to the right department.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Medical Or Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as medical practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health or 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 schedule an event and begin processing online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here for a detailed article on managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators 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 them aren’t specifically designed for medical-related usage, but there are several you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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 Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI 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 your site visitor’s Body Mass Index
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress 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 Plugin – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that lets users search posts with specific data. An editor that changes the layout of data in your post content is also included.
PubMed contains 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)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your WordPress site, your site visitors 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 select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Labels)
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 own a health or fitness-related business that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. The plugin also provides a number of additional features, including SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after photos, videos, etc. on your health & fitness website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise images on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click this link:
***
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org