In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- 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 posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- 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
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to run your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can add social features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and clients can plan their trips better
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Accounting Services Site
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers 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 height, width, scroll speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating repayments on automotive loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It even 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 invoices, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoice)
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 Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting And Financial Services
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes listed 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 Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
For more details about using this theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps 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 with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
For more details about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is developed specifically for accounting businesses. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, various color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, 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 – WordPress Theme)
This one was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was specifically designed to make your accounting site 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.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a corporate theme developed 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 for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and change the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – 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. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all professional themes.
Visit this website to learn more this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to make corporate sites look good.
It has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with six color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 sleek business themes.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This premium WordPress theme was developed specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This one was designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help establish your business reputation. It has 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 about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was designed specifically for firms that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. This theme 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, animations, and lots more.
For more details, 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, this guide has helped you learn ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins and themes.
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