In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Improving Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Extending Your Web Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select the department they want to contact. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- CD
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin offers several customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include width, height, background color, opacity, scroll speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, font family, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great tool for auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It even 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 your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many 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, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, viewing 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin 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 clients 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 – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With these themes you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized through premium add-ons.
Go here for more information about this theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes in a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included with the cost of purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is a child theme for the Genesis Framework built for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, many color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully 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 plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to help give your accounting site a professional look without looking dull. 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.
Visit this website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme designed 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. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional site you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically created to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It has 6 color schemes. It also has 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 beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
Adviser was designed specifically to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
Tax Help WordPress Theme was developed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms that offer tax services. It’s designed to show your services professionally to help grow your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. This 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 settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this WordPress 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
We hope that you have found this guide on ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site with plugins & themes useful.
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