In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Basic Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase traffic to your accounting or financial services business generation using plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads 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 posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some useful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your website easily with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
This section covers ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide users with information of high value and give them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets 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
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another option to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose the topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
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.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays 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)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin includes several customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it 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 colours, speed, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on auto loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of your invoices, create 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as 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 customers and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can expand this theme through premium add-ons.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the price.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme site:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was created 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 color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more information about this theme, visit this website:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to help 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 fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
To learn more about using this theme, visit this website:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you 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 web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their page without editing code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was created specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It has six unique color schemes. It also comes with 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 access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically developed to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms that provide tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services professionally to help build your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This one was specifically developed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
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 SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation with WordPress plugins and themes.
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