In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your accounting or financial services website using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin lets you set up a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Run an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Users can send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Leases
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes several customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for car loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients 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, quoting, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, access 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 For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, CRM and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting firms. With the themes listed below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme 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, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here for more info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is developed specifically for accounting services. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit any profession you want it to, 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.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to give your accounting site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes accordion, blog, circle counter, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, number counter, person, shop, tabs, toggle, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
Visit this site to learn more about this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This theme from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 different different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This theme was developed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those that provide tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help build your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business was built for organizations that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
More info:
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 useful.
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