In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
This section explains how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with information of high value and give them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces 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
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin offers loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, scroll speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font family, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The 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 a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out 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 locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, viewing 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple 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 Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
It integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional-looking 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 an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized using premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This inexpensive theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The cost of purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting 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, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is designed specifically for accountants. It provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive. Although this theme can easily fit 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.
Go here for more information about this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements 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 and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme developed specifically 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 clean-looking and loads fast.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a unique, professional website using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include bar counter, call to action, contact form, countdown timer, image, number counter, post title, pricing table, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was built specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique different 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 full access to over 80 stunning themes.
Go here for more info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help build 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 many custom shortcodes.
Visit this site for more details about this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business Theme was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a whole lot more.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using 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 ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and generate more traffic using WordPress plugins and themes helpful.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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