In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your health-related business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Health Profession
- Online Opportunities For Medical Services
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your medical-related business online.
Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Medical and health-related themes are covered in Part 3.
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses how to improve your website using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your 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 (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, tips for improving health, fitness and diet, access to fitness calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for 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 on your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something 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 prospects can choose which section of the clinic they are contacting your business about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right recipient.
Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Health Businesses
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Booking Calendar
(Booking Calendar)
Booking Calendar allows you to add online booking services to your site. This flexible plugin is well supported and provides users with an intuitive interface. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness and sports businesses, such as medical practices, specialists, health spas, booking sessions with personal trainers, etc.
(Booking Calendar – WordPress Plugin – Overview)
Booking Calendar works out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and offers multi-language support. A premium version is also available with additional features and functionalities.
For more details, go here}:
Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Ticketing Registration System
(Manage Bookings And Registrations Automatically With Event Espresso Plugin For WordPress)
If your business involves running medical events like seminars or workshops, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.
The Event Espresso online event registration software enables you to easily set up multiple events and start accepting bookings in just a few minutes
(Event Espresso – WordPress Event Management And Registration Plugin)
Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed plugin that gives you complete control of your event registration management process.
We have written a detailed article about Event Espresso here:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health use, but there are quite a few you can use, including the following:
- Body Statistics – e.g. ANC Calculator, Child Height Calculator, GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate) Calculator, Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) GFR Calculator, Waist to Hip Ratio Calculator, etc.
- Calorie – e.g. Calorie to kJ Calculator, Daily Energy Expenditure Calculator, Calories Burned Walking Calculator, etc.
- Fitness Tests – e.g. BAI (Body Adiposity Index) Calculator, Bruce Treadmill Test Calculator, etc.
- Miscellaneous – e.g. Bike Size Calculator, Blood Donation Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Sobriety Calculator, etc.
- Nutrition – e.g. Carbohydrate 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 Plugin)
The Calculated Fields Form plugin lets you create forms that perform single and complex calculations, such as:
- Health & Fitness Calculators
- Ideal Weight Calculator
- Pregnancy Calculator
- Calorie Calculator
- And more
A premium plugin version with many more features is also available.
For more details, go here}:
Weight Loss Tracker
(Weight Loss Tracker)
Weight Loss Tracker lets users record their weight periodically. This data is then shown in a graph and table.
(Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress – User Graph)
The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports various weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.
For more details, go here}:
Simple BMI Calculator
(Simple BMI Calculator Widget WP Plugin)
This simple plugin for WordPress lets you add a widget to 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 look at 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 (admin).
- BMI / IMC Calculator – A simple calculator that shows your users their Body Mass Index
- 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 Plugin)
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 – Results)
Drug information can be displayed inside your pages and posts, or as a widget on your sidebar. 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.
For more details, go here}:
PubMed Posts
(PubMed Posts WordPress Plugin)
PubMed Posts adds a dashboard widget that lets you publish content to your site from PubMed articles, and a search widget that helps visitors find posts with specific data. It also includes a simple editor that lets you change the layout of data in 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 – WordPress Plugin)
MJM Clinic was designed to add functionality to clinic and health care related websites, such as service pages with booking forms, related health conditions, locations, create staff listings for therapists/doctors and more.
For more details, go here}:
Treato WordPress Plugin
(Treato – WordPress Plugin)
Treato WordPress plugin lets you embed the Treato healthcare search engine into your WordPress sidebar so you and your site visitors can search drugs and read what patients are saying about different drugs.
Treato collects and analyzes experiences sourced directly from patients from related forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users gain insight about the side effects of over 26,000 medications, drug comparisons across over 14,700 medical conditions, which drugs people feel work, and more, from over 2.2 billion collected posts.
For more details, go here}:
HealthTap
(HealthTap Concierge WP Plugin)
HealthTap Concierge allows consumers to locate and book a virtual consult with doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, even smartwatch.
With With the HealthTap Concierge plugin for WordPress installed, your site visitors can type in a health question and 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 the doctor a question and get answers with the service, which has a database of over 70,000 doctors.
For more details, go here}:
TrendMD
(TrendMD Plugin For WordPress)
The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your site. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better decisions about the food they consume.
(WP Nutrition Facts – Create Nutritional Facts Labels)
This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.
For more details, go here}:
WP Ultimate Recipe
(WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress)
If you own a health or fitness website that provides nutritional or healthy eating recommendations, a great way to add engaging content to your site is to add recipes.
Plugins like WP Ultimate Recipe let you publish healthy and delicious recipes on your site.
Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:
- Recipe Card – Publish recipes with nutrition facts that your site visitors can print, save and review.
- EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily publish recipes on your site with features like cut & paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
- ZipList Recipes – Easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like SEO and Google Recipe View formatting are included.
- And many more.
For more details, go here}:
Awesome Fitness Testimonials
(Awesome Fitness Testimonials Plugin)
The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you showcase fitness & wellness testimonials, reviews and case studies on your website.
For more details, go here}:
Exercise Images by Everkinetic
(Exercise Images)
Exercise Images by Everkinetic lets you display exercise illustrations on your website.
(Exercise Images by Everkinetic Plugin – Database)
For more details, go here}:
In the next section of this detailed article, we will look at medical and health themes for WordPress.
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This is the end of section 2.
To view the rest of this guide, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum