In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Services
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- 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 the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run a social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engagement with your users
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin 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 form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins For Accounting Businesses
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads of customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for car loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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 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 plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, single-page 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting 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, viewing 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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 clients, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can customize Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes in a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This one is developed specifically for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, 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)
Accounting WordPress 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 designed specifically to help make your accounting business site look professional without 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 services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create any kind of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without editing any code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include audio player, call to action, code, divider, filterable portfolio, map, portfolio, slider, tabs, video, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme was developed specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
Adviser was developed to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This one was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business was developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a lot more.
For more information, 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
Hopefully, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and generating more visitors.
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