In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and run a social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with users
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also let users report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospects can select which topic they are contacting you about. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Accounting Site With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Tax
- Debit
- And 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 show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin provides loads of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, 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 others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, viewing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial 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. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with 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-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here for more information about this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This one is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s created specifically for accounting businesses. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, SEO friendly, and is 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 responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help give your accounting site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
Visit the theme site for more details about using this WordPress theme:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change 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 pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has 6 color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 professional themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium theme was specifically developed to help those in the financial industry to build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This premium theme was designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business was designed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about this 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 comprehensive guide has helped you learn ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more visitors using WordPress plugins and themes.
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