In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Health Services Providers
- Opportunities For Medical And Health Services Practitioners In The Digital Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Note: Plugins are described in this section. Themes for medical businesses are covered in Part Three.
Your Health Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve your health-related website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, checklists for improving general health and fitness, access to health calculators, discount vouchers, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health clinic or medical center is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct department.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Health Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress)
The Booking Calendar plugin allows you to add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface and flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a range of uses, such as medical practices, surgeons, alternative therapists, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works out of the box. Website visitors can check the availability of services and make an online booking quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive notifications. Booking Calendar also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your website’s sidebar, and offers multi-language support. The plugin is also available in a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticketing Management
(Manage Bookings & Registrations Online With Event Espresso For WP)
If you run medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online bookings literally in a few minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a feature-packed plugin that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
We have written an in-depth article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for medical or health use, but there are many you can add to your site, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Volume Calculator, Fat Calculator, Goal Weight Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Balke Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pace Calculator, Running Pace Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. Ideal Weight Calculator, Weight Loss Percentage Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
Calculated Fields Form is great for creating dynamically calculated field forms, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The developers of this plugin also offer a premium version with a ton of extra features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to enter target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WordPress Plugin)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple WordPress plugin that installs a widget on 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 look at that 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 displays your site user’s BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out 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)
Drug Interaction Data can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – 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 converts common names of drugs to their standardized RxNorm name.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, plus a search function that lets your visitors search posts with specific data. A simple editor that changes the layout of data in the 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as adding service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, multiple service locations, create service listings and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato Plugin)
This plugin lets you display information about drugs on your site and see what see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access valuable insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows users to consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress 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, connect in real time using video or text chat, or send questions and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
Trend MD
(TrendMD Plugin)
TrendMD lets you add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages, posts and custom post types, allowing your visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food and make more informed decisions about the food products they purchase.
(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Create Custom Post Type Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin)
If you own a health or fitness-related website that provides nutritional or healthy eating information, a great way to add content that will engage your readers is to publish great recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you add healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create and publish beautiful recipes that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – Lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting and preview button, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Lets you 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)
This plugin lets you add fitness & wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your site.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you insert a database of exercise diagrams into your web content.
(Exercise Images WP Plugin – Image Catalog)
For more details, go here}:
In part 3 of this detailed guide, we will be discussing themes that are suitable for medical clinics and health businesses.
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This is the end of section two of this article on ways to improve your medical-related business web presence.
To continue reading, click here:
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