In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting Profession
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes
Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
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 SEO
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for enticing visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can report problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several 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
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just 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
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- CD
- Credit
- 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 shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these 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, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for car loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
It will show 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 is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, create quotes, create single-page 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.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, viewing 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, 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 WP Plugin – Client Invoicing)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting And Financial Services
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting businesses. With the themes listed 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, has several page templates, custom menus, 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 with premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme has a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the cost of purchasing.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for accounting businesses. It comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to 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 responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme built specifically 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.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any type of professional site you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without touching any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was built specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six different color schemes, multiple page templates that 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+ stunning themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This theme was specifically developed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This premium theme was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally and help grow your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, 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, you have found this guide on WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more visitors to your accounting or financial services site useful.
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