In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic 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 (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run your own social network on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits including:
- 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 provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is 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
- Convenience for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website 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
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins For Accounting Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable ticker. You can 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 specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating car loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
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 For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also 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, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with 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, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, 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 WP Plugin – Invoicing)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This 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 menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy comes in a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy Theme provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the price.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for accounting services. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, various color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This one was designed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to help give your accounting business website a professional look without 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 accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website:
Divi
(Divi)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a professional website using the page builder or beautiful 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 easily change the structure of their web pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all sleek business themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically to make corporate sites look great.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 different 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.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This one was specifically built to help finance industry professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing advice 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 to learn more about using this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses offering tax services. This theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
Finance Business Theme was specifically built for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The 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 features, animations, and a whole lot more.
Go here for 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 how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your accounting or financial services site generation using WordPress plugins & themes.
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