In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving your website using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use 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
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run a discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section we discuss ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with others
An effective way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let visitors raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose the topic they want to discuss. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Accounting Site
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Tax
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating automotive loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing 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 lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, display 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 ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application 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 client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. With the themes below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily customize this theme by installing premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
This theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in the cost of purchase.
Go here for more details about using this WordPress theme:
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. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for accounting services. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to make your accounting business site 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 services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their pages without touching code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has bar counter, blog, code, countdown timer, gallery, login, post title, sidebar, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all themes.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation was specifically created to create good-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek 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 6 color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investment advice or tax advice. It 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.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
Tax Help was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help grow your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically built for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a lot more.
More info:
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 comprehensive guide on WordPress plugins and themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and generating more web traffic useful.
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