In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- 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 better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic 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 sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run your own social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage your own discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven way to entice visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also let users send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving 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
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with a number of customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing size, symbols, colours, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, display reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best themes themes available for accountancy firms. With the themes listed below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
Accountancy Theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. It 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 Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
Kathryn is designed for accounting services. The theme provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is 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 WordPress slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to help give your accounting site a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their page without editing any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes audio player, blurb, circle counter, countdown timer, image, login, portfolio, slider, social media follow, video, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all professional themes.
To learn more about about using this theme, visit this site:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was specifically designed to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy 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 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 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This theme was designed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax advice. 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.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that provide tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help establish your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, 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 increase web traffic generation with plugins.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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