In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health-related business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Services Professionals In The Web Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your health-related services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more traffic using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your medical-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up a social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you 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 More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we’ll discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Readers can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They 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 is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right destination.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. It is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a wide range medical, fitness and sports-related uses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Event Bookings Via The Web 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 enables you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich application that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
To learn more about Event Espresso, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical uses, but there are a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, FENa Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to input 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 BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can look at 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Information Screen)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search feature that locates posts with specific article data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in the 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, create staff listings for practitioners and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from online 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 Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, users 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 video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting 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 plugin for WordPress lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin 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-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – You can 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)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you add exercise drawings to your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we will be discussing health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two.
Click on this link to access Part 3:
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