In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – Improve Your Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve your 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 (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this plugin to set up and run a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, 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 – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section covers ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with users
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will 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 over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Leases
- 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 widgets as you want.
(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 a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin offers a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colours, speed, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out 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 locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, provide quotes, create 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, and many others.
The plugin gives you the ability to 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, display 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 WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticketing system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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 – WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, 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 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 benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This inexpensive theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website 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, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework built for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is responsive. 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.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to give your accounting website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their page without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 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. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically to make corporate sites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 different different color schemes, 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 all sleek business themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was developed to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investments or tax advice. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help Theme was designed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms providing tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help establish your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was specifically designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, 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
Hopefully, you have found this comprehensive guide on WordPress plugins that can help improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation useful.
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