In Part One of this guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Tips For Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores how to improve your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run a social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to run an online forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with others
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select which topic they want to discuss. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps 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 Generate More Visitors Using Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- CD
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin offers several customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator 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)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients 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 versions of your 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
You can 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, display 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket management system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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 For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme developed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
You can expand Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This one has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accounting businesses. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. 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 is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to help 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 fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
For more details about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. You can create a professional site using the page builder or 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 anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 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, social media follow, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically built to create great-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It has six color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
Adviser was built to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investment advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This theme was built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those offering tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally and help grow your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for businesses that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a whole 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, this article has helped you learn how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more web traffic with WordPress plugins and themes.
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