In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your accounting or financial services business online with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up and manage your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons on your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
This section looks at how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for interaction
- Provides other ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can report problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins - Accounting And Financial Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Leases
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing speed, text, colours, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The 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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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 complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing management system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international 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 client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has 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 through premium add-ons.
Visit the theme site to learn more this theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This one comes in a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and loads fast. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was developed specifically for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is 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 plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more details:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was designed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to help make your accounting site look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built 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 for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – 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 responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 sleek business themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This one from Elegant Themes was built specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This one was developed to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business 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. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional 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 WP Theme)
Finance Business was developed specifically for firms that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a lot 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 guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins and themes that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase visitors to your accounting site generation.
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