In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let readers provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with loads of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these 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 height, width, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, text color, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for automotive loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
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 displaying 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with 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 WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and 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 e-mail 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 For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, 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 Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
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, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily customize this theme with premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This one comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. The price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s developed for accounting businesses. Kathryn comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although it can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help give your accounting site a professional look 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 accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also 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.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. You can create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as bar counter, blog, contact form, email optin, image, map, person, pricing table, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is responsive and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This theme was built specifically to make corporate sites look great.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ professional themes.
Visit this website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This theme was developed to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This one was designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. It’s designed to show your services professionally and help grow your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. It 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 options, color management, animated elements, and a lot more.
For more details, go here:
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 comprehensive guide on ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and generate more traffic using WordPress plugins helpful.
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