In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Ways To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your accounting or financial services business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use 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)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up an online community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which topic they want to discuss. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- 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 Web Traffic Generation
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin includes loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customization features include height, width, scrolling speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for calculating car loans, real estate, or other large loans.
(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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Financial Services
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accountancy firms. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized through premium add-ons.
Go here for more information about using this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in your purchase.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more details:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements specifically designed to make your accounting site look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
Go here for more info:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has bar counter, blog, code, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, login, portfolio, sidebar, social media follow, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
Go here for more information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This theme was specifically developed to create great-looking corporate websites.
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 that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses offering tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the 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 built for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and lots more.
For more details, go here:
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 article has helped you learn WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
***