In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, 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
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets 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 site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so users can select the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding a map 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 improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- 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 Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Accountants
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(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 place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin offers several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for vehicle loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send 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.
WP-Invoice 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 business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, USAePay, and several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, displaying 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 WP Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
It integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy businesses. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This one offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, 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. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accounting businesses. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built to exude 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 business site look professional while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include bar counter, blog, code, email optin, filterable portfolio, number counter, post title, pricing table, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
Go here for more information about this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
The Corporation Theme from Elegant Themes was specifically designed to make corporate websites look great.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has six color schemes. It also has 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 all professional themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed specifically to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms providing tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed for organizations that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme 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 options, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
Go here for more info:
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 comprehensive guide on WordPress plugins & themes for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and generating more visitors useful.
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