In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – 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 plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
In this section we show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives 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
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Tax
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin installs a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
This plugin provides loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – 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 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send 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 business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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 knowledgebase and support ticket management system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients and invoices, 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 Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting firms. With the themes listed below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme built 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 a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme has a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The cost of purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically for accountants. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, 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, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Visit this website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help make your accounting business site look professional without 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 services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without touching any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
The Corporation Theme was created specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 sleek business themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This theme was specifically designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing or tax advice. 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 using this theme, visit this site:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help was specifically built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms that offer tax services. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help grow your professional 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 about this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This one was specifically built for firms that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and lots more.
More information:
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 and themes that can improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your site helpful.
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