In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting And Financial Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improving Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Your Accounting Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides 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 interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared with new potential customers
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide users with valuable information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let readers report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select which aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients 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 Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins - Accountants
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with a number 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.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, scroll speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating repayments on automotive loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send 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, quote creation, 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 several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying 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 WP Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like 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 customers and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme designed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can easily expand this theme by installing premium add-ons.
Visit this website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
Kathryn is designed for accounting businesses. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although this theme 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.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to 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 form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
To learn more about about using this WordPress theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built specifically 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 employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site 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 easily change the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
It has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 unique unique 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 full access to all stunning themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
Adviser was built to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally to help establish your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme was developed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and lots more.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
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 how to improve your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress.
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