In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WordPress Plugins – Improving Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Your Accounting Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, 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
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to run your own social network on your website.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with other prospective customers
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists 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 prospective clients to get in touch with you. Users can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, send suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to 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 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you add and manage multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your WordPress site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for 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 them 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 for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- 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 shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, text color, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
It will display 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)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s 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.
The plugin lets you add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, display 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports international 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating 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 list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting businesses. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme created for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, 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 with premium add-ons.
To learn more about this theme, visit this site:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme comes in a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. The price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress 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 types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This one is a child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s developed for accounting businesses. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit 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.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed 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 make your accounting business site look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. 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 clean-looking and loads fast.
Go here for more information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – 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. It is responsive and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was specifically created to make corporate sites look great.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six different color schemes, 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 all stunning themes.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This one was designed specifically to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing advice or tax help. 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.
Visit the theme website for more details about this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This theme was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms providing tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to 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 info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed for firms that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and lots 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 your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
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