In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Practitioners
- Opportunities For Health Professionals
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two & Three, we explore more ways to grow your health services online.
Topics covered in this (and the following section) include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your medical or health-related site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your medical or health business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness tools, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, podcasts, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the center they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin has an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, massage therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you run health seminars, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily schedule an event and begin receiving online bookings in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
Go here for an in-depth article on managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical-related uses, but there are many you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, FENa Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max 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, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium 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)
Calculated Fields Form is useful 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 plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that 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 that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI 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 that shows users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic WP Plugin)
This plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, create case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,000 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, users 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor their question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds 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 free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they eat.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Nutritional Facts Labels)
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 business that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create recipes with nutrition facts that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert exercise illustrations into your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we take a look at medical themes for WordPress.
***
This is the end of section 2.
To view Part Three, click here:
***
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)