In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your medical or health-related web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Medical Providers
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Businesses In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Health & Medical Services Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your health-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up an online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with new prospective customers
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to medical calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet 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 prospects can select which practitioner they want to contact. This will help get their comment to the correct area.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
Health Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment bookings to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and has an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Via The Web With Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health uses, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie 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 Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of extra 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. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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)
Simple BMI Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays 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 WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
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 data. A basic content editor is also included with the plugin.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about health conditions and symptoms.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of 26,500+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge 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, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
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, 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 WordPress plugin lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating 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 Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness-related business that provides diet or healthy eating advice, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets 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 – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you insert exercise illustrations into your posts and pages.
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at themes that are suitable for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part 2 of this guide on ways to build your health-related business presence online.
Click here to continue reading:
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"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com