In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Health Practitioners Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Services Practitioners
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Medical and health plugins are listed in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your medical or health-related website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your medical or health-related business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for improving fitness and nutrition, access to medical apps, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can select the section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct destination.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, such as medical practitioners, physicians, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make a booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and start processing registrations literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager System)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. To learn more, go here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health usage, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, FENa Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol 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)
With Calculated Fields Form you can create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with additional features and functionalities 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 – 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 BMI Calculator Plugin)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And many 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 drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin – Results)
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 drug names are converted to their standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search feature that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your 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 clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers 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 the widget installed, your visitors 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 health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat using text or video, or send the doctor their question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you own a health-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & 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. Includes additional SEO and Google Recipe View formatting features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your fitness-related website.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed guide, we look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section two of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your medical or health-related web presence.
Click here to keep reading:
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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