In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- 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 your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to raise concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and helps plan their appointments better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps 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
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 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 specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(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 sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating auto loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
It will display payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It even 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, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, access reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, 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 lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes below you can 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)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
This inexpensive theme comes with a variety of 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 fast loading. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. The cost of purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Visit this site to learn more about this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built for accounting businesses. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit 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 information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their page without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically to make corporate sites look great.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has six color schemes. It also comes with 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 sleek business themes.
Visit this website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
Adviser was specifically built to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your professional 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.
To learn more about this theme, visit this site:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and lots more.
Visit this site to learn more about this WordPress theme:
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 search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins & themes.
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