In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your health business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Businesses
- Basic Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical or health services online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Grow Your Medical Services & Health-Related Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(You can easily add social features to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for improving general health and diet, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the correct person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Health & Medical Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add appointment booking services to your site. It has an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, e.g. dental practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
This bookings 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 notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticketing Manager Plugin
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you run medical or health events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up an event and start processing registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-rich software that gives you full control over the event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health applications, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Due Date Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 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 Calculator
- And many more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter 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)
This simple plugin for WordPress 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 other WordPress 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 site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s Body Mass Index
- 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 Plugin For WordPress)
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 – Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. The data is provided by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a simple editor that changes the layout of your post content.
PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This versatile plugin can be used for clinic and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online 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 26,000+ medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With the widget 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send the doctor their question and get answers with the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 WP Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you run a health-related website that provides nutrition or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, 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 allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews, before and after pics, videos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise diagrams on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part 2 of this article on ways to improve your medical or health web presence.
Click here to continue reading:
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"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)