In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your health-related business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Medical And Health Services Practitioners Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Providers
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related services online.
Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your health or medical-related site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you set up and run your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up an online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(You can easily add social features to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for improving diet and nutrition, access to health applications, free trials, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets users report concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider if you plan to set up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which section of the center they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct area.
Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add appointment bookings to your site. It provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a range health and medical consulting uses, e.g. dental practices, specialists, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and make bookings quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. The plugin is also available in a premium version with a ton of additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management & Ticket Registration Software
(Manage Event Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso Plugin For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily create multiple events and begin accepting online bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticket Manager Plugin)
Event Espresso is a versatile and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.
We have written a comprehensive article about Event Espresso. For more info, see this article:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical uses, but there are many you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Durnin/Womersley Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned By Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form Plugin For WordPress)
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
A premium version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
This plugin lets users record their weight on given dates. This 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 BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget)
Simple Body Mass Index 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 additional plugins you can use to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly BMI and BMR calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the trainer.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data will retrieve and display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Database Results)
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 and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific article data. A simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in the post content is also included with the plugin.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin can be used to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information about symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about the side effects of over 26,600 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap – WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD Plugin)
This plugin lets you add 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 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 informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin – Nutritional Facts Label Creation)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe – WordPress Plugin)
If you own a health-related business that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great source of engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish delicious and healthy on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on 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 – 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 – WordPress Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your health & fitness-related sites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings on your website.
(Exercise Images WordPress Plugin – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we look at health and medical themes.
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This is the end of section 2 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health-related business web presence.
Click here to continue:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)