In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(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, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run an online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and give them something for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Users can report issues, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the department they want to contact. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website 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
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Leases
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
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 want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin provides a number of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating repayments on auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and several others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, access 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports different 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 For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best themes themes available for accounting. With the themes listed below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This premium theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Visit the theme website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accountants. Kathryn provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although it 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.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This theme was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to make your accounting business website look professional while not 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 services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme built 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. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any type of professional website you want 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 anyone to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, call to action, circle counter, email optin, gallery, login, person, slider, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
Go here for more info:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
Tax Help Theme was built specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those that provide tax services. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business 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, animations, and lots more.
To learn more about about using this WordPress theme, visit this 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
We hope that you have found this guide on ways to improve your accounting or financial services business online with WordPress helpful.
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