In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting Profession
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your accounting or financial services website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily 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 new leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and give 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 videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also lets readers provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create and manage multiple contact forms on your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the topic they want to discuss. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase 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 just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins For Accounting And Financial Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with several customizable features. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing size, symbols, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice 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 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 many others.
The plugin lets you add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, view 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, helpdesk with support ticket system, CRM and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoices, 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 – Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial 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. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized with premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy Theme offers a variety of 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 optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
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 provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is designed for accountants. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme could easily suit 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.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is 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 (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and loads fast.
Go here for more info:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional website you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes accordion, blurb, circle counter, email optin, image, number counter, person, sidebar, testimonial, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 professional themes.
Visit the theme site to learn more this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This theme was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six unique color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investing or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help Theme was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses providing tax services. It’s designed to show your services professionally to help establish your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a whole lot 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, this article has helped you learn ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic with plugins.
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