In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Improving Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins and themes that improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with content of high value and give them an additional item of value for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let users send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets 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 site
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for vehicle loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
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)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of your invoices, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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 system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing system, CRM and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting businesses. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has 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, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The price includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework built specifically for accounting businesses. It 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, many color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it 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.
For more information about this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to 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 accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily change the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has bar counter, blog, code, email optin, gallery, map, person, slider, tabs, video, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all professional themes.
For more details about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
The Corporation was specifically designed to create good-looking corporate websites.
It has a 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 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 all stunning themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
Adviser was specifically designed to help finance industry professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme 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..
For more information about using this theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow 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 many custom shortcodes.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
This theme was specifically developed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and lots 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, you have found this comprehensive guide on ways of improving your website with WordPress helpful.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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