In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Essential Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Enhance Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes
Online Business Tips For Accountants – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use 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
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Users can report problems, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for users
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they want to discuss. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins & Themes
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customizations include colours, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating repayments on automotive loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send 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 For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to 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 that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create single-page 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.
The plugin lets you add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail 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 WP Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, to do app, 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 client data and invoicing, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has 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 expand Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
Accountancy Theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy 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 cost of purchase.
For more details about this theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for accounting businesses. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, 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, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is responsive (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 must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Visit this website to learn more about using this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
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 specifically designed to give your accounting business site a professional look. 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 CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and change the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include bar counter, blog, code, countdown timer, gallery, number counter, post title, slider, tabs, video slider, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was specifically designed to create good-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has six different color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This theme was built to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Visit this website to learn more this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those providing tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally and help grow your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This theme was specifically designed for firms that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a lot more.
Go here for more information about using this WordPress theme:
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 ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors with plugins & themes.
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