In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins for WordPress that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors 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
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic 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 can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social sharing features to your site.
(You can easily add social features to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them something for free in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which department they want to contact. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some 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, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website to immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- CD
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – 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 loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
It will display payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress 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 that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, view 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)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application 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 Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With these themes you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme developed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, 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 customized with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
Accountancy Theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included with the cost of purchasing.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed specifically for accounting services. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, a variety of color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, 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.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help make your accounting 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 (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a unique, professional website using its 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 you to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
The Corporation WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes was specifically created to make corporate sites look good.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six different unique color schemes, 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 over 80 sleek business themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing 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 multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This theme was developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built for organizations that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a lot more.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
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 guide on WordPress plugins and themes that can help to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more web traffic useful.
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