In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Tips For Accountants – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you set up your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional 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 website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great tool for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
It will display payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It 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 WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
The plugin lets you add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, access 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
This 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 (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
Visit the theme site for more information about using this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme offers a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This one is developed specifically for accountants. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy 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 to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically 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 responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a professional website using its page builder or 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 easily redesign the structure of their pages without touching any code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include audio player, call to action, code, divider, image, login, person, pricing table, social media follow, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was created specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
It has a page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
Visit this website for more details about using this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed to help those in the financial industry to build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This one was designed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally and help establish 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.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business 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, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, 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
We hope that you have found this article on WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and traffic generation useful.
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