In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that can help improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use 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 search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and manage an online social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and run an online forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows 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 For WordPress)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customization features include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments. This is a great tool for calculating vehicle loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
It will show 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)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, view reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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 support ticketing management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple 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 WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting firms. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
Visit the theme website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress has a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. The price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Visit this website for more information about using this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Visit this website to learn more about using this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This one is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework created for accountants. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting 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 specifically designed 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 fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily edit the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include bar counter, blog, circle counter, divider, gallery, map, portfolio, shop, tabs, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation was created specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six 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 full access to all themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. 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.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. It’s designed to show your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the 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)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built for firms that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. It 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 whole lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 ways of improving your business online with WordPress helpful.
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