In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- 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 site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run a social community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users additional items of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Users can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ 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 site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(A map 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 That Can Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Leases
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
This plugin offers loads of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customization features include width, height, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
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 locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, displaying 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 WP Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – 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 Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accountants
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This premium WordPress theme comes in a variety of built-in 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, SEO friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme 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, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for accounting services. It has 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, SEO friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements specifically designed to help give your accounting business site 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a professional site 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 anyone to understand and change the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was specifically created to make corporate websites look great.
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 comes with six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all professional themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This one was designed to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. The Adviser theme 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 details about this theme, visit the theme site:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This theme was specifically built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that provide tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally to help establish your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and lots more.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, visit this website:
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 and themes that can help to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
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