In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Your Accounting Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins and themes for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and driving more traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below 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)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up an online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide them with high value content and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is 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
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective customers can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some 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 That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colors, size, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for calculating auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends 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 forms 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 users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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 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, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, viewing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks 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 – Invoicing)
It allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily expand this theme with premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and loads fast. It provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to help make your accounting site look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, blurb, code, countdown timer, image, number counter, post title, slider, testimonial, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was specifically created to make corporate sites look great.
It has a page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has 6 color schemes. It also comes with 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 80+ professional themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This premium WordPress theme was designed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investments or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help was designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax services. The theme is designed to show your services professionally to help build your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Visit this website to learn more about this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business Theme was specifically developed for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
For more details about this WordPress theme, visit this 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, this guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and traffic generation.
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