In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage an online social community on your website.
- bbPress – Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and manage a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
This section covers ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide them with content of high value and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let users report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms 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 to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which topic they want to discuss. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are 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
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, typeface, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for auto loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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 WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, display 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoicing)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoicing, 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 – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. 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 for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily customize this theme with premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a child theme for the Genesis Framework built specifically for accounting businesses. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various colors, is easy to use, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit 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.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help 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 mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this theme:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without touching code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes accordion, blog, contact form, countdown timer, image, number counter, person, pricing table, testimonial, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically to make corporate sites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 unique unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investments or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
Tax Help was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help grow your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This one was developed specifically for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, 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 settings, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
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
Hopefully, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic using plugins.
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