In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section explores ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors with plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines With WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured 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 With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets readers raise concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most 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 Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display 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)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with a number of customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, 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 allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating auto loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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 is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, display 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, 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 invoices, 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 WP Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme created for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized using premium add-ons.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included with your purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework built for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements designed specifically to give your accounting business website a professional look. 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional website using its 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 you to understand and redesign the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has audio player, blurb, circle counter, countdown timer, gallery, number counter, post title, pricing table, tabs, video slider, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was created specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has 6 color schemes. It also has 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 over 80 stunning themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
The Adviser Theme 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 Adviser 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.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This theme was built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those providing tax assistance. This theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It has 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 Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
For more details about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
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 comprehensive guide has helped you learn ways of improving your website using WordPress themes and plugins.
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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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