In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With WordPress Plugins
- WP Themes – An Overview
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you run a social network on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social features to your site with WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide them with high value content and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert 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.
Another feature to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- CD
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar 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 individual categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating auto loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends 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 a form 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 lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to 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 e-mail 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 system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticket system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme 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 lots more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for accounting services. The theme offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it can easily fit 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)
Accounting WordPress Theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements specifically designed to make your accounting website look professional while not looking dull. 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 accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about about using this theme, visit this website:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of 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. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 professional themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically built to make corporate websites look good.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 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 full access to over 80 themes.
Go here for more info:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed specifically to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investments or tax help. The Adviser theme 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.
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
Tax Help Theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those providing tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the 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 – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically built for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a lot more.
For more details about this theme, visit this website:
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 comprehensive guide has helped you learn how to improve your website with WordPress plugins and themes.
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