In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of your content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and run your own social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage your own online community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section we discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with new prospective customers
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let readers report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Leases
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, speed, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a 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 users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin 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 the WordPress user management database to keep track of your 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, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, 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, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can expand Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in your purchase.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Visit this website for more information about using this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme was built for accountants. Kathryn comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive. Although this theme could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically 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 responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme 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 modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and change the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi WP Theme – Page Builder)
It has 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 responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was specifically built to create great-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six color schemes. It also comes with 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 themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax help. Adviser 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.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms providing tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help grow your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This theme was built specifically for organizations that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a whole lot 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 comprehensive guide has helped you learn how to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic to your accounting or financial services website generation with plugins & themes.
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