In Part One of this guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your 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 to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let readers report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
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 and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose the department they want to contact. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below 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 And Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Accounting Or Financial Services Site
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with several customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on automotive loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator 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)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice 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 that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin lets you add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, access reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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 complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket management system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
It integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. With the themes listed below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting 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, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This inexpensive theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. It provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one 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. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is a child theme for the Genesis Framework built for accounting services. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit 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.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme 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 website a professional look without 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 services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without touching code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme site:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was specifically designed to make corporate websites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with six 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 full access to all themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
Adviser was developed to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investing advice or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This theme was built specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those providing tax assistance. It’s designed to show your services in a professional way to help grow your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business was developed specifically for firms that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and lots more.
Go here for 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
We hope that you have found this article on WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and generating more visitors to your site useful.
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