In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Health Practitioners
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses
- Essential Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we continue exploring more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for engagement with your users
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving general health and diet, access to medical calculators, free trials, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right recipient.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. It provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, e.g. dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and 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. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If your business involves running health or medical seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software lets you easily schedule multiple events and begin receiving bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management & Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-rich software that gives you full control of your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health usage, but there are quite a few you can include in your website, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Fat Calculator, Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient 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 WordPress Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium plugin version with a ton of extra features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of other plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
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 Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 gain insight about 14,500+ conditions and over 26,000 medications from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With HealthTap Concierge installed on your site, 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 choose a doctor, chat over video or text, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin allows you to add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display a database of exercise illustrations inside your content.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss WordPress themes that are suitable for health and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your health web presence.
To continue, click here:
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