In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WP Plugins Extend Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Improving Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins and themes that can help improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-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 – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast 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 (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin can be used to set up and manage a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features on your website.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared online with others
A proven way to attract subscribers to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Tax
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
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 Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great tool for calculating vehicle loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, viewing 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 WP Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like 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 invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme created 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, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This one comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the cost of purchase.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for accountants. It comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, various color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting website a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any style of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as accordion, blog, circle counter, countdown timer, gallery, map, portfolio, shop, testimonial, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 professional themes.
Go here for more information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This one from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six different unique color schemes, 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 full access to 80+ stunning themes.
For more information about this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was developed specifically to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The 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.
Go here for more information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was developed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
Finance Business Theme was specifically designed for firms that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
Visit this website to learn more about using this theme:
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 article has helped you learn how to improve your accounting website with WordPress plugins and themes.
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