In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses how to improve your website using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
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 pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to subscribe is to provide users with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins 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 Generating More Visitors
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website to immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Tax
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin offers several customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, opacity, scroll speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on car loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create 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 others.
You can 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 e-mail notification templates, access 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
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 and communicate with clients, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme developed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
Accountancy Theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was created for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit 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.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was specifically designed to make your accounting business site look professional while not 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more details about this theme:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and change the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It 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. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was specifically built to create great-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax help. The theme 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 information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help Theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses offering tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help establish your professional 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.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This one was developed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and lots more.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme site:
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, you have found this article on ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation with WordPress plugins helpful.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
***