In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Health And Medical Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In Parts Two & Three, we discuss more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Functionality To Your Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Business Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you 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 user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with content of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so users can select the section of the practice they are contacting your business about. This ensures that visitors’ enquiries reach the right area.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers 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 SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add online booking services to your site. It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a wide range of medical-related businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This bookings plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online easily. Administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. The plugin developers also provide a premium version with extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticket Registration System
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress lets you easily set up your event and start receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich application that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article on the benefits and features of using Event Espresso. Go here to learn more:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
Calculator Pro provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are several you can include in your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMR Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Creatine 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)
This free plugin is great for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculators
- And lots more
A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget – WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other plugins you can check out that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator to show users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin retrieves and displays information about drugs, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin For WordPress – Results)
Drug information can be displayed on your site. 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 posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in your post content 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)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato)
This plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows you and your users to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users receive valuable insight about 14,500+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the plugin installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
TrendMD 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)
WP Nutrition Facts lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling 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 recommendations, a great source of engaging content to your site is to add great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you easily publish recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes entering recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. on your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images – WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images lets you display a database of exercise diagrams on your fitness-related website.
(Exercise Images Plugin – Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3, we will be discussing themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to build your health-related web presence.
To view Part Three, click this link:
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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