In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation Using Plugins And Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this free plugin to set up and manage a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress lets you set up and run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared online with others
An effective way to entice visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Visitors can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reduces 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 post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose which department they want to contact. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps customers can plan their trips better
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins And Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your 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 that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Payments
- CD
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin offers several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customization features include size, symbols, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing 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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also 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, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create 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 others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, viewing 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
The plugin supports different 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting And Financial Services
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, 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 through premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This inexpensive theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with your purchase.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to 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 mobile-friendly. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This one is developed for accountants. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements specifically designed to help make your accounting site look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s 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 clean and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional site 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 easily redesign the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically developed to create good-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six different unique color schemes, multiple page templates that 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 stunning themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal 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. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax services. This theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help grow 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.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This one was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and lots more.
For more details, 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 comprehensive guide on ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation using plugins helpful.
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