In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Essential Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WordPress Plugins
- Understanding WordPress Themes
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation using WordPress plugins & themes.
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 – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with others
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also let users send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your website, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Tax
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin offers loads of customizable ticker. 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 individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for automotive loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.
It will display 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 business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create 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, and several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, accessing 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 system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports different 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting And Financial Services
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy businesses. With the themes below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress 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, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
You can customize Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the cost of purchasing.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This one 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, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WP Theme)
This one is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework built specifically for accounting businesses. The theme offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to help give your accounting business site a professional look. 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 section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional site using the page builder or beautiful and unique 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 edit the structure of their web pages without editing 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 audio player, call to action, code, countdown timer, gallery, map, post title, shop, social media follow, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
Visit this website for more information about using this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This premium theme was specifically developed to make corporate sites look great.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The theme 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..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This one was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those offering tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally and help build your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built for firms that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred 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, animated elements, and lots 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 article has helped you learn WordPress plugins that can improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your accounting website generation.
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