In Part One of this article on ways to build your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Features
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social features to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 lets you create multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps clients can plan their trips better
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers 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, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins For Accounting And Financial Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Tax
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers several customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating automotive loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
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 site owners with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate 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, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, single-page 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, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, viewing 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, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme has a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This one is developed specifically for accountants. It comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, various colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). 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.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to help make your accounting website look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a free corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It 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.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and change the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. 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. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ stunning themes.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This theme was created specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all sleek business themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Visit this website to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This one was built for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was developed for organizations that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 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.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
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, you have found this comprehensive guide on WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation helpful.
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