In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Basic Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Capability
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways to improve your accounting or financial services business online with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Set up your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – 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 site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which department they want to contact. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps 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
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin includes several customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scroll speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on auto loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
It will show 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, view 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 WP Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients and invoices, 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 – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting businesses. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP 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, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and fully responsive. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to 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, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme was designed specifically for accounting businesses. The theme offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is responsive. Although this theme could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress 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 designed specifically to make your accounting website look professional without looking dull. 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 services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was created specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six different different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all professional themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax advice. 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.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This theme was built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help build your business reputation. It has different 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 premium theme for WordPress was built for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website:
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 that improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
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