In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up and manage a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to retain and grow your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Visitors can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily and helps clients can plan their appointments better
- Shows 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 site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins For Accounting And Financial Services
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with several customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, typeface, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send 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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, display 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 system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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)
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 WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This is a turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized by installing premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This inexpensive theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. The price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this theme:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
For more details about using this theme, visit the theme website:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically for accounting businesses. The theme provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Visit the theme site to learn more this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to make your accounting business site look professional while not 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 section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation was created specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
It has a page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has six color schemes. It also comes with 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+ beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This theme was developed to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more information about this theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms providing tax services. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help grow your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme was developed specifically for businesses that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, 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, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
For more details about using this theme, visit the theme site:
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 article has helped you learn ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins & themes.
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