In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – 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.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up and manage your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to set up and run your own online discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets visitors provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving 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
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which topic they are contacting you about. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and customers can plan their appointments better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients 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
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
The plugin includes several customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
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)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand 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 your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like 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, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, access reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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 solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
The plugin 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accountancy businesses. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme developed 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily expand this theme with premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, loads fast, and fully responsive. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included with the cost of purchasing.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is designed specifically for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, a variety of color options, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is responsive. Although it can easily fit 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)
This premium WordPress theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to help make your accounting business site look professional while not looking dull. 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 CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more details about using this theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without touching any code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
To learn more about using this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation Theme from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to create good-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six different color schemes. It also comes with 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 80+ themes.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help establish your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This one was built specifically for firms that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. It 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, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
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
We hope that you have found this comprehensive guide on ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation using plugins & themes useful.
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