In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Your Accounting Website – Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Site Generation With Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends 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 provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- 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 Driving More Visitors
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- CD
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – 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 page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes a number of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customization features include height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font family, font size, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating auto loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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 site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, USAePay, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, accessing 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 complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoice)
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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client 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 – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accountancy firms. With the themes below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, 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.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme. The cost of purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
Kathryn is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework created specifically for accounting businesses. It comes with a slider, multiple layouts, 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, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress 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 specifically designed to help give your accounting website a professional look. 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, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. You can create any style of professional site you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This theme was specifically developed to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built to help finance professionals build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme was designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those that provide tax services. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help build 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 additional custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme 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 features, animations, and lots 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you learn WordPress plugins that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
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