In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- Basic Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Features
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn how to improve your business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to run your own online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
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. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin offers loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colours, size, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating automotive loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a 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 you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin 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 that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes - Accounting Services
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting 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 web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
This inexpensive theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The cost of purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This 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 types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
Kathryn is built specifically for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color choices, is easy to use, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession, 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.
To learn more about using this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help give your accounting website a professional look while not 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 a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or 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 easily redesign the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WP Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to make corporate websites look good.
It has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, multiple page templates that 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 professional themes.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investing advice or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here to learn more this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those providing tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help establish your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium WordPress theme was designed for organizations that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
For more information, go here:
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 guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins that improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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