In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Basic Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Improve Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases engaging with your users
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership 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 report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving 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
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 allows you to insert multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Tax
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing size, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for calculating automotive loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator 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 For WordPress)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
You can add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, view 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 For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks 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 – Client Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting firms. With these themes you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting 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 a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This premium theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for accountants. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and 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 engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme 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.
To learn more about using this theme, visit the theme website:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to give your accounting business site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s 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. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any style of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without touching any code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This one was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six different 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 over 80 themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser)
Adviser was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investments or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms providing tax services. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help establish your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This one was developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business 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 settings, color management features, animated elements, and lots 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you learn how to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and drive more visitors using WordPress plugins and themes.
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