In Part One of this article on ways to grow your health web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health & Medical Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Medical Providers
- Basic Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In Parts Two and Three, we explore more ways to grow your health or medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part Three.
How To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your medical or health site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you run a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to fitness apps, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, podcasts, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical center is adding sections to your contact form so users can select the section of the practice they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right recipient.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Health & Medical Businesses
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your health or medical website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin provides visitors with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of uses, such as dental practices, physicians, health spas, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments online quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available and includes additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Management And Ticket Registration Plugin For WordPress
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Via The Web With Event Espresso For WP)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software allows you to easily create multiple events and start receiving online bookings literally in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Management And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
Go here to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t designed for medical or health uses, but there are quite a few you can use, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. BMI Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Skinfold Body Fat Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Pace Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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)
This plugin lets you create forms with dynamically calculated fields to display the calculated values, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version with additional features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. The data is then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert 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 Plugin For WordPress)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a free plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
In addition to Simple BMI Calculator, there are a number of WordPress plugins you can use that perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A mobile-friendly Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (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 a user’s Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, by entering their age, sex and weight.
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)
This plugin retrieves and displays drug information, including what the drug is used for and what other medications the drug is known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – Results)
Information about drugs 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you add content from PubMed articles, and a search widget that lets visitors search for posts with specific article data. It also includes a basic editor that changes the layout of your post content.
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 to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites that provide information to site visitors on symptoms and health conditions.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,500 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 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 Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget 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 choose a doctor, connect in real time over video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the HealthTap service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD)
This plugin lets you add 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 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 and posts, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – 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-related website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to add great recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish recipes with nutrition facts that site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
Awesome Fitness Testimonials lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic)
Exercise Images lets you display exercise drawings inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at WordPress themes that are suitable for health-related and medical businesses.
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This is the end of section two.
To view the rest of this article, click this link:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)