In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses how to improve your website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin lets you create multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- 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, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
WordPress Plugins For Accountants
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin includes several customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing size, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating automotive loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating 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 users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients 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, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, accessing 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting 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 a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded by installing premium add-ons.
Visit this website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. It provides what 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.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was created for accounting services. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to help give your accounting website a professional look. 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 form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include audio player, call to action, contact form, email optin, filterable portfolio, map, post title, sidebar, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
Go here for more details:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation WordPress Theme was specifically designed to make corporate sites look good.
It 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 has six different color schemes. It also has 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 full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically built to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This one was designed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those that offer tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed for businesses that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and lots 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
We hope that you have found this comprehensive guide on WordPress plugins that can help to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation helpful.
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