In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Features
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is a vital 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 SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
This section explains ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective customers can select the aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more 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 For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with a number of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customization features include colors, size, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
It will show 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and others.
WP-Invoice 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, 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 Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoicing)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes listed below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme built 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 lots more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This theme has a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting site 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 the features your business needs without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and one year of support.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accounting services. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting business website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and change the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes bar counter, blog, code, email optin, filterable portfolio, map, post title, sidebar, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was built specifically to make corporate websites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It has 6 different color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that 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 over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was specifically built to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. The Adviser 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.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, 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, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
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 ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more visitors with plugins and themes helpful.
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