In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your health-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Health Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Medical and health plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part Three.
Tips For Medical And Health Services Providers – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and diet, access to medical apps, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which section of the practice they want to reach. This will help make sure that visitors get their message to the correct recipient.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more 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, Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical or health website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, surgical centers, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your 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 plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager System
(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and start receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related use, but there are a few you can include in your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is useful 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
A premium plugin version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on 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 mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And 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 drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed inside your posts and pages, or as a widget on your blog 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 as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets users search for posts with specific article data. A basic editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,700+ conditions and over 26,500 medications 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 via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your 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 video or text, or send questions and get answers with the service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
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 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)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that 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 in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create search optimized recipes that readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise images on your health and fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related web presence.
To view Part Three, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now