In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Providers In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical services online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are listed in Part 3.
Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore ways of improving your website using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your health-related website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin lets you set up a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to health calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their comment to the correct destination.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and clients can plan their appointments better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range medical and health consulting businesses, such as medical practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin – Overview)
The plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and make online bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also offer a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If your business involves running 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 receiving online registrations in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager & Ticketing Registration Software)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for health or medical-related usage, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric Body Fat Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin developers also offer a premium version with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
This simple plugin lets you add a widget to your sidebar 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 BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display information about drugs, including what the drug is used to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed inside your web content, or as a widget on your blog sidebar. 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 their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you crate posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that locates posts with specific 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, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, patient feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects 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 over 14,700 conditions and over 26,500 medications from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, 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 select a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Creating Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe)
If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating suggestions, a great way to add content that will engage your readers 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 recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your content.
(Exercise Images – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed article, we look at WordPress themes for health and medical businesses.
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