In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Add New Functionality To Your WordPress Website With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Ways To Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will show.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install 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 to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run an online forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we will discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to add multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
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 visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin provides loads of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin allows your users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for car loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification 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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates 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 locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoices, create quotes, create single-page 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 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 e-mail notification templates, displaying 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 WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accountants
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy firms. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized through premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This one offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in the cost of purchasing.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s designed specifically for accounting businesses. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is responsive. 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 responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
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., is designed specifically 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 responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more information about using this theme:
Divi
(Divi)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their pages without touching any code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has accordion, call to action, circle counter, countdown timer, gallery, map, portfolio, pricing table, social media follow, video, fullwidth header, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all stunning themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, 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+ stunning themes.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This theme was built to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. It 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 using this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help WordPress Theme was specifically built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those providing tax services. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help grow your professional reputation. It comes with 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 Theme)
Finance Business was developed specifically for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
More information:
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 ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins.
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