In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Services
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Improve Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic to your accounting or financial services business generation using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- 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 can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with information of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let readers report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which department they want to contact. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website 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 Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Accounting Services Site
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets 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 sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with several customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customizations include colours, size, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating vehicle loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include displaying payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating 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.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, display 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket system, client relationship management and many more features.
(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 – WordPress Plugin)
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 WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized by installing premium add-ons.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This premium theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included with the cost of purchase.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework built specifically for accounting services. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was developed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to make your accounting site look professional while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any kind of professional site you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 professional themes.
For more information about this WordPress theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This theme was specifically created to make corporate sites look great.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a nice 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 all sleek business themes.
Go here for more info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
Adviser was specifically designed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing advice or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way to help grow your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot 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 guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and generating more web traffic.
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