In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own online social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with other potential customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Visitors can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can select the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, size, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing 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 lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients 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 your WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, viewing 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application 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 Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer 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 – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
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 for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy businesses. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized through premium add-ons.
To learn more about about this theme, visit this site:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the cost of purchase.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It 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 responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is created for accounting businesses. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, a variety of color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
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., was specifically designed to help give your accounting business website a professional look while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. You can create a unique, professional site using the 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 easily change the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation was specifically designed to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation 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 comes with 6 unique color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme was designed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investments or tax help. 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 widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
Tax Help was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that provide tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was specifically built for firms that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 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
We hope that you have found this guide on how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more visitors using plugins and themes helpful.
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