In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Improving Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WP Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to run an online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll show you how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract 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 an exclusive report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers report problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms to your site, customize the form and the mail 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 the department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Accounting Or Financial Services Business Generation
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 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 quite a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Tax
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin provides loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, opacity, scroll speed, number of stocks displayed at one time, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for car loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing 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 out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your 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.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, view 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, 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 – Client Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes listed below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded by installing premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
Accountancy Theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme was built for accounting businesses. Kathryn 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, many color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more details:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to 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 form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create any style of professional website you want using its page builder or 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 easily edit the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has bar counter, call to action, contact form, email optin, filterable portfolio, number counter, person, shop, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This one was specifically built to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all sleek business themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
Adviser was built to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investing advice or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business Theme was specifically designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and lots more.
For more information, 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, you have found this guide on ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic to your business generation with plugins and themes useful.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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