In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting And Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Business Generation With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared with other potential customers
A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps plan their trips better
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 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 quite a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Tax
- Equity
- And lots 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 show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with loads of customizable features. You can 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 individual categories.
Appearance customizations include width, height, scroll speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, font family, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for auto loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
It will display 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 is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, view 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 complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client 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 – WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose 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 and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting 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, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This one comes in a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included in the price.
To learn more about about using this theme, visit this website:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework built for accountants. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, many colors, is easy to use, search engine friendly, and is responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, 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 info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to make your accounting business website 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and loads fast.
Go here for more info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create any type of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their page without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
Go here for more information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six different 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 all sleek business themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This one was developed specifically to help finance professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investments or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses offering tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
Finance Business was specifically built for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
More info:
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
We hope that you have found this comprehensive guide on how to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors with WordPress plugins and themes useful.
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