In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress Themes – An Overview
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Generating 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 using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will display.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a social community on your WordPress site.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides many 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 a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for site visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you add multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical 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 supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin offers a number of customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating vehicle loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
Plugin 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, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, viewing 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 WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro 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 menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved 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.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This inexpensive theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This theme 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 administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme for WordPress was created specifically for accountants. Kathryn offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help give your accounting business website a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more info:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and change the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
The Corporation Theme was designed specifically to make corporate sites look great.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching 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 full access to all stunning themes.
To learn more about this theme, visit this site:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This theme was designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investments or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms providing tax services. This theme is designed to show your services professionally to help establish your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This theme was built specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
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, this article has helped you learn ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your accounting business generation using WordPress plugins.
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