In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Website’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Your Accounting Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
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
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users something for free in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin includes several customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
This 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)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This one has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium WordPress 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 admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created for accountants. Kathryn provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, SEO friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although it can easily fit any profession you like, 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.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to help give your accounting business site 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 (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create any kind of professional site you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their pages without touching any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes accordion, blurb, code, email optin, gallery, number counter, post title, shop, social media follow, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
For more details about using this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
The Corporation Theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to make corporate sites look good.
It has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
Visit the theme site to learn more this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This theme was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help build your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This one was specifically developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme 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, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
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 guide has helped you learn ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins.
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