In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Tips For Accountants – WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so users can choose the department they want to contact. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more popular 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 For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
WordPress Plugins - Financial Services
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also 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
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
This plugin offers a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for automotive loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
It will display 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 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 locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports international 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer 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 Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can expand Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress comes with a variety of 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 is responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for accounting businesses. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). 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.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was developed with the idea of 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 without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation Theme was developed specifically to make corporate sites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It has 6 unique color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
Adviser was designed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investing advice or tax help. It 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 using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
Tax Help was specifically built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses providing tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Visit the theme site to learn more this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This one was built for firms that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and lots 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, this guide has helped you learn ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation using plugins.
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