In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to set up and manage a social community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a 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 an additional way for your content to be shared with others
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive report, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can raise concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you create multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
This plugin includes loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating automotive loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, access 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticketing management system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
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 clients and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accounting 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded by installing premium add-ons.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress has a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included with the cost of purchasing.
Visit this website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically for accounting businesses. Kathryn offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession you want it to, 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 WordPress theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help 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 responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and fast-loading.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional website you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and change the structure of their page without editing a single line of code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, call to action, circle counter, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, login, post title, pricing table, tabs, toggle, fullwidth header, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This theme was specifically designed to create good-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design. 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. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ professional themes.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built to help those in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This one was developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax services. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was built for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this 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, increase user engagement and generate more visitors using WordPress plugins.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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