In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Essential Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Your Accounting Website – Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Set up an online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use this free plugin to set up and manage a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for engaging with your users
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. Readers can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins And Themes
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Tax
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating car loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
This plugin 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 forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, CRM and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports different 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 Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting 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 look at some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has 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, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy Theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WP Theme)
This premium theme was developed specifically for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, SEO friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was developed to enhance 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 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 accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically 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. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional website you want using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without editing any code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all professional themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was specifically built to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 different different color schemes, 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 all professional themes.
Visit the theme site for more information about using this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Visit this site to learn more about using this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This one was developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax services. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help build your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme website:
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
We hope that you have found this guide on WordPress plugins and themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more traffic useful.
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