In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Services
- Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a social network on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of 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
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Accounting Site Generation Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- CD
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin installs a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios 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 post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating vehicle loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate 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 invoices, provide quotes, create 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 others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, view reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application 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)
iBilling 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 Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accountants
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. With the themes listed below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This is a turn-key theme developed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can expand Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
Visit the theme website for more information about this theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This theme 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 types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is designed for accounting businesses. It has 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 choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although it can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more details:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help give your accounting site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any style of professional site you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their page without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include accordion, blurb, contact form, email optin, filterable portfolio, map, post title, slider, tabs, video, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This one from Elegant Themes was specifically created to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, six different 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 over 80 sleek business themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This one was built to help those in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that provide tax services. This theme is designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow 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.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed specifically for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot 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
We hope that you have found this article on how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins useful.
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