In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we explore how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors with WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run your own discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin lets you insert multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective customers can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Show location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Debit
- 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 widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on auto loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
It will display payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create forms 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.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create 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 others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, 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, 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing 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 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With the themes below you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers 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 a whole lot more.
You can easily customize this theme with premium add-ons.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy Theme comes with a variety of 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 optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accountants. It comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various colors, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is fully 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 slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help give your accounting business website a professional look without 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 services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professionals 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 staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create any kind 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 web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes audio player, call to action, code, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, login, post title, sidebar, tabs, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically to make corporate sites look great.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
For more details about this theme, visit this site:
Adviser
(Adviser)
Adviser was designed to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This theme was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way and help grow your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
Finance Business was specifically developed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 WordPress plugins & themes that improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase visitors to your website generation.
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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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