In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your health business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health Practitioners In The Online Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In Parts 2 and 3, we explore more ways to grow your medical or health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Note: Health and medical plugins are described in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part Three.
Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your medical or health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to run your own forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides 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 ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for improving diet and well-being, access to medical tools, discount vouchers, membership access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- 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 multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which section of the center they want to reach. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the right area.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and helps clients can plan their visits better
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
This free bookings reservations plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range medical and health consulting uses, e.g. dental practitioners, physicians, chiropractors, booking patient appointments, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium version with a ton of additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso For WP)
If you run health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed 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 use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Swimming Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein 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)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium version of this plugin with a ton of additional features and functionalities is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple WordPress plugin that lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin For WordPress)
Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are a number of plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer (site administrator).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on age, sex and weight.
- And 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 to treat and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Data Results)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your posts and pages. 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 – WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search feature that lets your visitors search for posts with specific article data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of data in the post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, online books and life science journals.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
The MJM Clinic Plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about 14,000+ medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(Trend MD Plugin)
TrendMD adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite interesting 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 lets you insert a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Label Creation)
This plugin 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 business that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you easily publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search engine optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, live custom formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials allows you to add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your fitness-related site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you insert exercise illustrations into your web content.
(Exercise Images Plugin For WordPress – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we take a look at health and medical themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of part two.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum