In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- Themes – An Overview
Tips For Accountants – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available many plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast 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 known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress lets you run your own social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Readers can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides 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
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers 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
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Leases
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scrolling speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
It will display payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 most valuable clients and top grossing line items), and more..
For more details, go here}:
All In One Business Management Application
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Financial Services
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in the cost of purchase.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accountants. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This premium theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to give your accounting business website a professional look while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more information about using this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional site using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include audio player, call to action, contact form, email optin, image, map, portfolio, pricing table, tabs, video, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was specifically designed to make corporate websites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This one was specifically designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help WordPress Theme was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms that provide tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help grow your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
More info:
Avada
(Avada Finance WordPress Theme)
Avada is a fully responsive and versatile multipurpose theme that lets you easily build, configure, and run any kind of website you want without touching code, including a website for an accounting or finance-related organization.
To learn more about the Avada theme for WordPress, go here: Avada
Hopefully, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn ways of improving your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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