In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Web Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with other potential customers
An effective way to entice visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Users can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so users can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin offers a number of customizable features. 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 specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for vehicle loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients and invoices, 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 WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best themes themes available for accountancy businesses. With these themes you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme created 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 (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can easily expand this theme by installing premium add-ons.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress offers a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is 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 about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Visit the theme website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework developed specifically for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was created to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements specifically designed to give your accounting site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site 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 anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It has 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. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 themes.
Go here to learn more this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was created specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with 6 unique color schemes. It also has 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+ themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investment 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.
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those offering tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help build your professional reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
Finance Business was built specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 guide has helped you learn how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more traffic using plugins & themes.
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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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