In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
How To Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins that improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available many plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engaging with your users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows visitors to raise problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your website, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- CD
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating automotive loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
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 For WordPress)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, USAePay, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, viewing 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
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 Plugin – Invoicing)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting businesses. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
To learn more about about using this theme, visit this website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This inexpensive theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is built for accountants. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is 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 WordPress slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was 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 (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed 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 employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include bar counter, blog, circle counter, divider, gallery, map, person, pricing table, tabs, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six different color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
Adviser was designed to help finance professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax advice. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your professional reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically designed for businesses that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole 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 WordPress plugins that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic.
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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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