In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Tips For Accountants – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Your 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 – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you set up a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to get your visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with valuable information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a special report, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch. Contact forms also let users report problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select which aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most 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 For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin includes several customizable ticker. 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 specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font family, font size, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a 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 Plugin)
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. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
You can add custom payments and charges, create 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, access 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With these themes you can 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)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, 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 by installing premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. 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.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically for accounting businesses. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it 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 – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about about using this theme, visit this website:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
For more information about using this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This theme from Elegant Themes was created specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
Visit the theme website to learn more this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This theme was designed specifically to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that provide tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for organizations that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, 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, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Go here for more information:
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 article on WordPress plugins & themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and web traffic generation helpful.
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