In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- Understanding Themes
Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available various plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways 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 fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run a community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides a number of customizable features. Choose from 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 specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
This plugin 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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create single-page 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, USAePay, and many others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, view 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, to do app, 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 and communicate with clients, 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)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme created 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can customize Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This one comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and fast loading. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. 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 site any way you want. It 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 fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for accounting businesses. The theme offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed to enhance 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 while not 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 form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional site you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi WP Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investment advice or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium theme was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that provide tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, 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 settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
For more information, 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 article has helped you learn how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins.
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