In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Tips For Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and generating more traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to set up and manage your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with other potential clients
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let readers provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so users can select which topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more 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 Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress 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 with shortcodes.
This plugin includes a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, font family, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on 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.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms 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 integrates 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, quote creation, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, viewing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded by installing premium add-ons.
To learn more about about this theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy Theme provides the features you need without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme was built specifically for accounting services. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive (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 plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was specifically designed to help 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 mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi 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. It is responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 sleek business themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also comes with 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 sleek business themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
Adviser was designed specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help Theme was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services professionally and help build 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.
Visit this website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a 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, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins and themes.
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