In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your health-related web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Medical & Health Businesses
- Opportunities For Health And Medical Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In Parts Two & Three, we continue looking at more ways to grow your health-related business online.
Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Note: Medical and health plugins are covered in this section. Health and medical themes are listed in Part 3.
Your Medical Practice Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your health or medical website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your medical or health website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to run a community forum on your website.
- 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.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with other potential customers
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and well-being, access to fitness calculators, discount vouchers, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a health center or medical clinic is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get their message to the right department.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps 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
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Health Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your health or medical-related website to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin)
The Booking Calendar plugin lets you add online bookings to your site. This flexible plugin has an intuitive and user-friendly interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range of health-related uses, such as medical practices, physicians, 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 availability of services you offer and make bookings quickly and easily. Site administrators and visitors receive booking confirmations. The plugin also lets you add a calendar or booking form to your site’s sidebar, and supports multiple languages. A premium version of this plugin is also available and includes a ton of extra features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso
(Manage Event Bookings Automatically Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)
If your business involves running medical or health events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin lets you easily schedule an event and begin receiving online registrations in just minutes
(Event Espresso)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete 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)
Calculator Pro Calculators provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t specifically designed for health use, but there are a few you can add to your site, including:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Ponderal Index Calculator, Stride Length Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Daily Calorie Calculator, RMR Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. Push-Up Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Advanced One Rep Max Weight Lifting Calculator, Cigarette Savings Calculator, Pregnancy Calculator, Smoking Cost Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate Calculator, Macronutrient Calculator, etc.
- Weight – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Calculated Fields Form
(Calculated Fields Form)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin is useful for creating forms that perform single and complex calculations, including:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with additional features.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker is a simple plugin for WordPress that lets logged-in users record their weight periodically. The results are then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker WP Plugin – 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 Body Mass Index Calculator Widget
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget Plugin)
This simple WordPress plugin 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 other WordPress plugins you can check out to perform similar functions:
- BMI BMR Calculator – A BMI 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 shows your users their BMI
- Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors calculate 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin 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 – Data Results)
Information about drugs can be displayed as a widget or inside your web content. 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 Plugin For WordPress)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, plus a search widget that locates posts with specific article data. The plugin also includes a basic editor that lets you change the layout of your post content.
PubMed comprises more than 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.
For more details, go here}:
MJM Clinic
(MJM Clinic)
This versatile plugin was designed for medical and health care related websites. You can add service pages with booking forms, locations, provide related health conditions, assign case studies, link indication tags to services and conditions, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato)
Treato lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so your site visitors can search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences written in related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the content to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel are working, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, personal computer, even smartwatch.
With the widget installed, users 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, chat over text or video, or send the doctor a question.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(Trend MD)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your WP 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP Nutrition Facts is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your site visitors to learn about the nutrient content of food in a standardized format and make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts 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 business that provides diet or healthy eating information, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add 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 – Publish search optimized recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut & paste, plain text recipe auto conversion, live custom formatting, 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. Includes additional Google Recipe View formatting and SEO features.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness and wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images Plugin)
The Exercise Images plugin lets you display a database of exercise diagrams inside your pages and posts.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – Image Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this guide, we look at themes for medical and health businesses.
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This is the end of part two of this guide on ways to grow your health-related business presence online.
Click on this link to continue:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now