In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- How To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- WordPress Plugins – Extending Your Blog’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Site Generation Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
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 XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve 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 powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up an online social networking community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online discussion forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide users with valuable information and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips 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 customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors raise problems, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you create and manage multiple contact forms to your website, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Add A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more 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 Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Accountants
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for 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 provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- CD
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin provides loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing speed, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful financial tool for calculating repayments on auto loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
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)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, create quotes, create 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
This 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 – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress 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 list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can expand this theme with premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This inexpensive theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The cost of purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting 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 header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
Kathryn is developed specifically for accounting businesses. The theme offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, a variety of colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements designed specifically to help make your accounting site look professional while not 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 a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include accordion, blurb, circle counter, divider, filterable portfolio, login, portfolio, shop, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This one from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all sleek business themes.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investments or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help Theme was designed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help build your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Visit this website to learn more about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
Finance Business Theme was specifically built for firms that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. It 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, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a lot more.
To learn more about about this WordPress theme, go here:
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 business online using WordPress.
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