In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical & Health Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Web Site’s Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: Plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Health Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and generating more web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides 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 website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
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 sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to run your own online social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to health tools, free trials, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for users
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 is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical center is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct destination.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display 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 Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins For Medical Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your medical site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports uses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, alternative therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check availability of services you offer and make an online booking easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. A premium version of this plugin is also available with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Manager
(Manage Your Events Online With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress software allows you to easily schedule multiple events and start accepting bookings in minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health usage, but there are several you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Fat Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Creatine Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator (kg), Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form WP Plugin)
This plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This simple plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – 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
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator)
Simple BMI Calculator is a free WordPress plugin that 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 additional plugins you can use to 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.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their 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 Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Database Results)
Drug information 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, plus a search feature that lets users search posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, clinic locations, feedback entries and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato WP Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your users can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers 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 the side effects of over 26,600 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
(HealthTap Concierge – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video 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 choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WordPress website. 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 lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to make more informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Custom Post Type Label Creation)
This plugin 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 nutrition or healthy eating suggestions, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily add recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search engine optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on 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 – You can 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your fitness-related websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add exercise drawings to your fitness sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we take a look at medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of part 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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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