In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Providers Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses
- Improving Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts 2 and 3, we discuss more ways to grow your medical business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities
- WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part Three.
Your Medical Services & Health-Related Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and generating more visitors.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content 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 immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your site.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social features to your website using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with information of high value and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for improving health and nutrition, access to health calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage 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.
Something 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 the practitioner they want to contact. This helps get their message to the right destination.
Add A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Medical Services And Health Clinic Site
Health & Medical WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical-related site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online booking services to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range health and medical consulting businesses, e.g. medical practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
This bookings plugin works right out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services you offer and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticket Registration System
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso WP Plugin)
If you plan to run medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WP plugin enables you to easily create multiple events and start receiving online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Manager)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed software that gives you complete control over your event registration management process.
If you want to learn more about Event Espresso, refer to this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health-related uses, but there are quite a number you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Body Surface Area Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient 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)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are additional plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive Body Mass Index 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 that displays your site visitor’s 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)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information 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 WP Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that finds posts with specific article data. A content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed contains 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)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, provide information about health conditions and symptoms, add case studies, link indication tags to conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and 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 medical 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 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to consult with doctors who specialize in a given health topic via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, users can type in a health question and based upon their location and type of question, they will receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers via the service.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
This plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin that 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 informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides dietary or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Publish search 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 and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to display fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your health & fitness site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin For WordPress)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you add a database of exercise drawings to your fitness-related sites.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we take a look at medical and health themes.
***
This is the end of section two of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your health business presence online.
Click here to continue reading:
***
***
"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now