In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation using plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images 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 content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
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
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we will discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits, 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 highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to entice visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin provides a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating car loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a 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 lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with 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 the WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and many others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert 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, display reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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 complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best themes themes available for accountancy firms. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
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, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This one has a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in your purchase.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This one is designed for accounting services. Kathryn comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many color choices, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to give your accounting website a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
For more information about this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any style of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 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. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 sleek business themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was specifically designed to make corporate sites look great.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 stunning themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This one was specifically designed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses providing tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way and help establish your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for organizations that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
More information:
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
We hope that you have found this guide on WordPress plugins and themes that can improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more traffic useful.
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