In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins that can help improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- URLs – 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 article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin lets you set up and run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we’ll show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides 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 site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is adding 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.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator 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 forms 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.
This plugin integrates 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, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, access 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoice)
The plugin 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress 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, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This inexpensive theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Visit the theme site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accounting services. It comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is 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 is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to help give your accounting business site a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional website using its 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 you to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible 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. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Visit this website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was specifically built to make corporate sites look good.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, 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 80+ sleek business themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser)
The Adviser Theme was specifically built to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing advice or tax advice. Adviser 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.
For more details about this theme, visit the theme website:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms providing tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help establish your business 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.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was specifically built for organizations that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
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, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and traffic generation.
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