In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Website With WP Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Your Accounting Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins & Themes
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that 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 SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- 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 WordPress plugins you can add to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you set up your own social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides other ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Users can raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- 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 Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with a number of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The 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 is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It even 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, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticket management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, 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 customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling 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 accounting businesses. With the themes listed below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has 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 a whole lot more.
You can customize Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress comes in a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and loads fast. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically 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 colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is 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.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to give your accounting business website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a free corporate theme developed 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 employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their page without touching code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 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 fully responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically developed to make corporate websites look good.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
The Adviser Theme was built to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This one was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those providing tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help grow your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This one was designed for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a 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, you have found this guide on ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic with plugins & themes helpful.
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