In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Basic Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will display in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as 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, comments, and social features. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social network on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add social sharing features to your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for engaging with your users
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with other potential customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value content and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let users report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin installs a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with loads of customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these 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 size, symbols, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin)
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 WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster 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, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme developed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can customize Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help 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, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included with your purchase.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This one is built for accounting services. It provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more information about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to give your accounting site a professional look while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
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. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
For more details about this theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily change the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include audio player, blurb, code, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, login, post title, pricing table, testimonial, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 different unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This theme was built specifically to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing advice or tax help. Adviser 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 info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses providing tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the 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)
This theme was developed for firms that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a lot more.
Go here for 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 guide on WordPress plugins for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and generating more visitors helpful.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
***