In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting And Financial Services Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
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
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that improve your accounting or financial services 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 search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Tax
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include width, height, scrolling speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font family, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification 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 lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out 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, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
It integrates with several 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 for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
Accountancy comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework designed for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, many colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it 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.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This one was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to help give your accounting business 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 fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
Go here for more information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional site you want using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without touching any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include audio player, blurb, code, divider, gallery, login, person, pricing table, tabs, video, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ themes.
Go here for more information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme was specifically developed to make corporate websites look good.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six unique different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was designed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more details about using this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally to help build your business 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.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was developed specifically for firms that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a lot more.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme website:
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 guide on how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins useful.
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