In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Tips For Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores how to improve your accounting or financial services website with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – 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 posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use 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)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you set up and run a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
This section will show you ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable content and offer them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Users can raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides a number of customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scrolling speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, font family, font size, 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 repayments on car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
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 is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is a 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This inexpensive theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme for WordPress was created for accounting services. It provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, a variety of colors, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession, 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 information about this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to 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 mobile-friendly and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a professional website using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include audio player, blurb, code, email optin, gallery, number counter, post title, sidebar, tabs, video, fullwidth header, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 professional themes.
Visit the theme site to learn more this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation Theme was built specifically to make corporate sites look great.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has 6 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 full access to over 80 professional themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help build your professional reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
Finance Business was developed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a lot more.
More information:
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 article on WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and generating more visitors useful.
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