In Part One of this article on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your business online with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available various plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user 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 – Use BuddyPress to set up and manage your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Contact forms also allow users to raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin lets you add multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website to immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
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. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes several customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, scroll speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for automotive loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
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 WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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, 2Checkout, USAePay, and many others.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email 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 Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application 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 Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. 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 – WordPress Theme)
This is a 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 (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized by installing premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in your purchase.
Visit this website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is designed specifically for accountants. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, a variety of color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although it can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help 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 fully responsive and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional site you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without touching code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit this website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation Theme was built specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, 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 80+ sleek business themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically to help finance professionals build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing or tax advice. The Adviser theme 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..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that provide tax services. It’s designed to show your services in a professional way to help grow 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.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for firms that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a lot more.
To learn more about this 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, this article has helped you learn ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins & themes.
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