In Part One of this step-by-step article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available many plugins that improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social network on your website.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing engagement with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with other potential customers
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let users raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress 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 configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the department they want to contact. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and plan their trips better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients 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 Visitors With WordPress Plugins
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 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 For WordPress)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
The plugin includes a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customizations include speed, symbols, colours, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful financial tool for calculating auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
It will show 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients 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 versions of invoices, 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.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, access 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes below you can have 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 premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized using premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for accountants. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is 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 plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to make your accounting business site look professional without looking dull. 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, and a blog.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
To learn more about using this theme, visit this site:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has audio player, blurb, code, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, map, person, sidebar, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth header, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 professional themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was specifically created to make corporate sites look great.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with 6 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 access to over 80 themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal 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. It also includes a built-in 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)
Tax Help Theme was developed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those providing tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your professional reputation. It provides different 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 information about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was developed for organizations that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, 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 settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you learn WordPress plugins that can improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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