In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- A Basic Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting 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 more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up an online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with users
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let readers report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms to your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin offers several customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
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 WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying 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)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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)
iBilling 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 – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accountancy firms. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accountancy 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-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
For more details about this theme, visit the theme website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy 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, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the cost of purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
To learn more about this theme, visit this site:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is created for accounting businesses. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers 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 color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to make your accounting website look professional while not looking dull. 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 accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Visit this site to learn more about this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed 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 employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its 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 anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 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. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 sleek business themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This premium theme was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all professional themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically designed to help finance professionals 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. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
Tax Help was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that provide tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help grow your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically built for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, 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 a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, 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 guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins and themes that can improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic.
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