In Part One of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Capabilities
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To WP Themes
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Business Generation Using WordPress Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you run your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free plugin lets you set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social features to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Providing A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with other prospective clients
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users something for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- 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 page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective customers can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help 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
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Your SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Accounting WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- CD
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing speed, symbols, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email 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, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticketing management system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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 Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes - Accounting And Financial Services
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to 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, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s built for accounting services. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive. Although this theme could easily suit 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.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help give your accounting 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 responsive and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create any type of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include bar counter, blog, code, countdown timer, gallery, map, post title, shop, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This premium theme was specifically built to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has 6 color schemes. It also has 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 full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was built specifically to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help build your business 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.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a whole lot more.
Visit this website to learn more this 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
We hope that you have found this article on ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation using WordPress plugins useful.
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