In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting And Financial Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation With Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes that can help to improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to set up and run your own social network on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select which topic they want to discuss. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more popular 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 Drive More Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colors, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on automotive loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, displaying 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, help desk with support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin)
iBilling 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 – Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is built specifically for accounting services. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, many colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This premium theme was developed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements specifically designed to make your accounting 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 services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme specifically designed 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 and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a professional website 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 redesign the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include audio player, call to action, contact form, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, map, post title, slider, tabs, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically to make corporate websites look great.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six 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 sleek business themes.
Visit this website for more information about this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This theme was designed specifically to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investments or tax help. The Adviser 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.
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed for organizations that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
For more details, 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
We hope that you have found this article on ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic with plugins and themes helpful.
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