In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your accounting business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Site With WP Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes
Tips For Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress 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 ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run your own online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- 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 offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow readers to provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you insert multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Accounting Services Website
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Tax
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of 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 Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
The plugin includes several customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing speed, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets users calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for car loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.
It will display payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form 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.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send 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 from clients, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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 solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, 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 – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster online by integrating 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, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With the themes listed below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme built for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
Accountancy offers a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress 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 admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here for more details about using this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was created specifically for accounting businesses. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you like, 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 – 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 make your accounting website look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without editing any code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all professional themes.
To learn more about using this theme, visit this website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
The Corporation was specifically designed to create good-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 different different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This one was designed specifically to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This one was designed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those that offer tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services professionally to help build your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This theme was specifically built for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and lots more.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this WordPress 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, you have found this guide on WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more traffic useful.
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