In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Tips For Accountants – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set 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 by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to run an online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you run a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared online with other prospective customers
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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 visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin installs a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
This plugin provides a number of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customization features include width, height, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, real estate, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form 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 business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through 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.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, displaying 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, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application 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 clients and invoicing, 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 – Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy businesses. With the themes below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This premium theme for WordPress comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the price.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for accounting services. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). 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.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built 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 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 mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful 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 easily redesign the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include audio player, blurb, circle counter, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, map, portfolio, slider, tabs, video slider, fullwidth header, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Visit this site to learn more about using this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to make corporate websites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, 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 over 80 sleek business themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Adviser
(Adviser)
Adviser was designed specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme was built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business 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, animations, and a 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 comprehensive guide on WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and traffic generation helpful.
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