In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Digital Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Improve Traffic
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and driving more visitors.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run your own social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Set up a forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can easily add social features to your site using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
This section looks at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding email newsletters] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Users can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives 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
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Tax
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 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)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin comes with several customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customization features include height, width, scroll speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for automotive loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their 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, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and many others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, 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, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress 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 benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme 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, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can easily expand this theme using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy Theme comes in a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for accounting businesses. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with 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 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 want it to, 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.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help make your accounting site look professional without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
For more details about using this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was specifically built to make corporate sites look great.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all sleek business themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
Adviser was built to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investments or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses offering tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally to help establish your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This theme was developed specifically for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. This theme 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, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and a whole 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, you have found this guide on ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more visitors with WordPress plugins & themes useful.
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