In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, we discuss WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and driving more visitors to your accounting or financial services website.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow readers to raise concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins For Financial Services
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Leases
- Debit
- 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 widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scroll speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin 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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate 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, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and 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 notification email 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that 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 – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoice)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress 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, a custom menu feature, 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 by installing premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
Accountancy offers a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with your purchase.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme website:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This one is designed specifically for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was specifically designed to make your accounting business site look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any style of professional site you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This theme was specifically designed to create great-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all stunning themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This one was specifically built to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. 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.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help was built specifically for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses providing tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally to help establish your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This theme was developed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, 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 settings, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Go here for more info:
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 WordPress plugins and themes that can improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation helpful.
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