In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
How To Improve Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your accounting website generation using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you run a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you set up your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides you with an additional way for your content to be shared around with new potential clients
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide high value content and give users something for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for improvements and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- 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 post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms to your website, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
This plugin includes a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customization features include speed, symbols, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating car loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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 For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send 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 the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add 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, 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 complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, 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 Invoicing)
It allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme developed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers 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 customized with premium add-ons.
Go here for more information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with your purchase.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was created specifically for accounting services. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit 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 information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to help give your accounting business website a professional look. 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
Visit this site to learn more about this theme:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include bar counter, blog, circle counter, divider, image, login, post title, slider, testimonial, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to make corporate sites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all sleek business themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax advice. Adviser 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.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This theme was developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that provide tax services. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help establish your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a lot more.
Go here for more details about this WordPress 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, you have found this article on ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more traffic with plugins helpful.
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