In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting And Financial Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Essential Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Ways To Improve Website Traffic Using WordPress
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 loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up and manage a social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving engagement with users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with new potential clients
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with information of high value and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Visitors can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Accounting Or Financial Services Site Using Plugins & Themes
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Leases
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – 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 showing 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-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 free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, accessing 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, helpdesk with ticketing system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accountants
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme built 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was created 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 make your accounting website look professional while not 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 services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their page without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 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. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 stunning themes.
To learn more about about using this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This one was built specifically to make corporate websites look great.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This one was developed to help finance professionals build trust online 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. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This theme was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms providing tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way and help build your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed for businesses that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
Go here for more information:
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 article on ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors with WordPress plugins and themes helpful.
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