In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins that can help improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social network on your site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional 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 website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we will discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can raise problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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 is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting site to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Leases
- Credit
- And lots 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 show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes a number of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customization features include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating automotive loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create forms 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.
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, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, view 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes - Accounting
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme created 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.
You can easily expand this theme by installing premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme has 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, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the cost of purchasing.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is a child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s built for accountants. Kathryn offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to make your accounting business website 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
More info:
Divi
(Divi)
This theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. You can create a unique, professional site using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as accordion, call to action, code, countdown timer, gallery, map, person, sidebar, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to make corporate sites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser)
Adviser was developed to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investments or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those offering tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help grow 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.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This one was built specifically for businesses that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, 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 whole lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 guide has helped you learn ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors to your accounting or financial services website with plugins and themes.
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