In Part One of this guide on ways to build your health-related business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Health Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Basic Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Your Health Services Website – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website using WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up and run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- 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 user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with content of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health applications, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also let users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider if you are setting up a website for a health clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct area.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
Medical Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical and health consulting businesses, e.g. medical practitioners, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management
(Manage Event Bookings Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical or 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 create an event and begin receiving online registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. For more details:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for health use, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that 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 use that 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 administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays a 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 drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 versatile plugin was designed for clinic and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information on symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access 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 – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your visitors 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
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, 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 add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Label Creation)
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 run a health or fitness website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish 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, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your health and fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise diagrams inside your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we will be discussing health-related and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to build your medical-related web presence.
To view Part 3, click here:
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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