In Part One of this article on ways to build your health business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health And Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health-related services online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. WordPress themes for medical businesses are listed in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more traffic using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up and manage a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with new prospective clients
An effective way to get your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness applications, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right area.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Health Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WP Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is suitable for a wide range of health-related uses, such as dental practitioners, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
The plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Manager Software
(Manage Event Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up your event and start accepting online bookings in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticket Management)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control of the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health or medical-related applications, but there are a number you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Carbohydrate Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, US Navy Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Calcium Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin)
This plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And many more
A premium version of this plugin with many 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 periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – User 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of other WordPress plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays 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 pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar menu. 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)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. A content editor is also included.
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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, service locations, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin For WordPress)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin 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 using video or text chat, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the HealthTap service.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read interesting scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts 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 or fitness-related business that provides nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 SEO and Google Recipe View formatting.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health & fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin)
This plugin lets you display a database of exercise drawings on your site.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part three, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical businesses.
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This is the end of part two.
Click here to continue reading:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum