In Part One of this article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Businesses Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, 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 (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways 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 sharing features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s discuss now how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Readers can report problems, contact specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- 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)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the department they want to contact. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and plan their visits better
- Show location of events
(A map 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Tax
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin includes loads of customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customization features include colours, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating auto loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include displaying payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out 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, quote creation, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email 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, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, 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 – Client Invoicing)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme 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, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized by installing premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress comes in 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 optimized, and loads fast. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the price.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework created for accountants. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit 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 using this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to help give your accounting business website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the 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 anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 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. It is responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This one from Elegant Themes was specifically designed to create great-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 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 full access to all professional themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
The Adviser Theme was built specifically to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investments or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This one was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that provide tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and 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.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme was designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more visitors.
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