In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up your own social network on your site.
- bbPress – Set up a discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – 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 website using WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
Let’s now discuss ways to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so users can choose the department they want to contact. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Shows location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin provides a number of customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for calculating automotive loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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 WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, display 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 solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoice)
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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy Theme comes in a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and loads fast. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in your purchase.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
Kathryn is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s developed for accountants. The theme offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress 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 give your accounting business site a professional look 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 accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their pages without touching any code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include accordion, blog, circle counter, email optin, filterable portfolio, map, person, slider, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed to make corporate sites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing advice or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Visit the theme website for more information about using this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. 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 additional custom shortcodes.
For more information about using this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme was developed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business 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 a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a lot more.
More info:
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 comprehensive guide on ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase traffic generation using WordPress plugins useful.
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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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