In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Digital Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhancing Your Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes
How To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways WordPress can help to 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).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has 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 other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section looks at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engagement with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- 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 site
- Is convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can select the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
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 posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin offers loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for calculating vehicle loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
This 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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, displaying reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports international 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 customer data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoicing)
It allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This is a 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized by installing premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This inexpensive theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with 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). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme was created specifically for accountants. It provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, various color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you like, 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.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to help make your accounting website look professional without 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
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 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. It has audio player, blog, circle counter, divider, gallery, login, person, slider, social media follow, video, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
Visit this site to learn more about using this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation Theme from Elegant Themes was specifically built to make corporate sites look great.
It 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 comes with 6 different color schemes. It also has 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 access to over 80 sleek business themes.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed specifically to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investments or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
To learn more about about this theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help Theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It has different 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)
This theme was built specifically for organizations that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a lot more.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
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 how to improve your website using WordPress themes and plugins helpful.
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