In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your health-related business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Health & Medical Profession
- Opportunities For Health & Medical Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Themes – An Overview
Note: WordPress health and medical plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are covered in Part 3.
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your health or medical-related website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One 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 (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up and run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social features to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your health or medical-related business.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness apps, free trials, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider if you are setting up a website for a medical practice is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the section of the practice they want to reach. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your health-related website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. Booking Calendar has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is suitable for a range of medical, health and beauty-related businesses, e.g. dental practices, surgical centers, chiropractors, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar Plugin For WordPress – Overview)
This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check the availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive email notifications. The plugin is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. A premium plugin version is also available with many more features.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration & Ticketing Manager Plugin
(Manage Your Events Online Using Event Espresso For WordPress)
If you plan to run medical or health 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 start receiving online registrations in minutes
(Event Espresso – Event Registration And Ticket Manager)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of the event registration management process.
Go here if you would like to learn more about managing events with Event Espresso:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
Calculator Pro Calculators is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t specifically designed for medical or health-related usage, but there are many you can add to your website, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Fat Calculator, Lean Body Mass Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, WHtR Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Water Intake 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 Plugin)
Calculated Fields Form lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And many more
The plugin developers also provide a premium version with a ton of additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to input target weights and provides support for the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator)
Simple Body Mass Index Calculator is a simple plugin for WordPress that installs a widget on 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 check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that displays Body Mass Index
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, based on their age, sex and weight.
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Drug Interaction Data Plugin
(Drug Interaction Data)
Drug Interaction Data Plugin for WordPress can be used to display drug information, including what the drugs are used to treat and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.
(Drug Interaction Data WP Plugin – Information Screen)
Drug information can be displayed as a widget or inside your pages and posts. 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 creates posts from PubMed articles, and a search function that locates posts with specific article data. A simple content editor is also included with the plugin.
PubMed includes 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)
This plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. It lets you add service pages with booking forms, provide information about symptoms and health conditions, add case studies, link indication tags to services, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search a vast drug database and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes patient experiences written in medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about over 14,000 medical conditions from over 2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap Concierge
(HealthTap Concierge WordPress Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to consult with real 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 HealthTap Concierge installed on your website or blog, 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 particular topic. They can then choose a doctor, chat using text or video, or send questions.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin)
The TrendMD plugin adds the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to increase their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, cite or read scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Nutrition Facts
(WP Nutrition Facts WP Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a nutrition facts table into your pages and posts, allowing your site visitors to make more informed food choices.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Creating Labels)
WP Nutrition Facts 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-related website that provides diet and nutrition or healthy eating advice, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to publish healthy recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes with nutrition facts that your site users can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe makes publishing recipes on your site easy with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, live custom formatting, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add exercise diagrams to your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In part three of this guide, we take a look at themes for medical businesses.
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This is the end of section 2.
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