In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your health-related web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Medical Services Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Health Providers In The Online Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In Parts 2 and 3, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered in this (and the next section) include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are listed in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and manage a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section covers ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your health business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with other potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, vouchers, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins 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 insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider if you are setting up a website for a clinic or medical center is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form enquiries reach the correct person.
Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Medical Or Health Businesses
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your medical or health website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. Booking Calendar provides users with an intuitive interface. It is suitable for a range of medical, health and beauty-related businesses, such as dental practitioners, surgeons, chiropractors, booking yoga classes, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – 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 email notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available and includes many additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Manager And Ticketing Registration Software
(Manage Event Bookings Online With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running health or medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin allows you to easily set up an event and begin receiving registrations in a few minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Manager And Registration Plugin For WordPress)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article on Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t designed for medical usage, but there are many you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Max Heart Rate Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Coopers 12 Minute Run Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you create dynamically calculated field forms, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
A premium version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin)
This simple plugin lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This simple WordPress plugin lets you add a widget to your website that can be configured and customized to match your theme.
As well as Simple BMI Calculator, there are additional WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A responsive BMI and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the site administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
This plugin can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Results)
Information about drugs 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 converts common names of drugs to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that helps visitors find posts with specific data. An editor that lets you change the layout of data in your 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 WP Plugin)
The MJM Clinic Plugin can be used for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide related health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services and 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 see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from online forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain valuable insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,500 medical conditions, which drugs people feel are working, and more, from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. who specialize in a given health topic via HD video or text chat from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, your 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 health topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using video or text, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD – WordPress Plugin)
TrendMD will 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 Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make informed decisions about the food products they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress – Create Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labelling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you run a health or fitness business that provides nutrition or healthy eating information, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to add recipes.
A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you add recipes on your site.
Other WordPress recipe plugins include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish search optimized recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to 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 Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies, before and after photos, etc. to your health and fitness websites.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise diagrams in your content.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section, we take a look at health and medical WordPress themes.
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This is the end of section two of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your health or medical-related business web presence.
Click on this link to read the rest of this article:
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