In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Essential Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Web Site’s Capability
- WP For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
How To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display.
- 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
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up an online social network on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so users can select the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
It will display 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 lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also 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 the WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, accessing 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports different 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster 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, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized with premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
This theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was built for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to help give your accounting business website a professional look while not 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 section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. You can create a professional site using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has accordion, blurb, circle counter, countdown timer, image, number counter, post title, pricing table, social media follow, video, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme was created specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 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 all professional themes.
For more details about this WordPress theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser)
The Adviser Theme was specifically built to help those in the financial industry to build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Visit the theme site for more details about using this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This theme was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help grow your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
Finance Business was specifically designed for businesses that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, 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
Hopefully, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins that can help improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
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