In Part One of this guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Ways To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of WordPress plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress helps you run a social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also let users report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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
- Is convenient for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are very useful tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for 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 that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Equity
- And 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 – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin comes with a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customization features include size, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for calculating vehicle loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This 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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice 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, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
This is a turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here for more information about this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This 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 types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
Kathryn is developed specifically for accountants. Kathryn offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, a variety of color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to give your accounting business site a professional look 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 CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms 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. These include bar counter, blurb, contact form, email optin, gallery, number counter, person, shop, social media follow, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 professional themes.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This one from Elegant Themes was created specifically to make corporate websites look great.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 different 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.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investments or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium theme was designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services professionally to help grow 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.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and lots more.
More info:
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 search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more visitors using WordPress plugins & themes.
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