In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Essential Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- How To Improve Web Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Site’s Capability
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins and themes that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more web traffic.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available various plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- 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 search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social network on your website.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to set up a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide users with high value information and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 lets you insert multiple contact forms to your website, customize the forms 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 adding sections to your contact form so users can choose the department they want to contact. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers 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 And Themes That Can Help To Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress 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 them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Tax
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin includes several customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, scrolling speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.
It will show 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email 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 complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports international 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 WP Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme designed 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WP Theme)
Accountancy has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system 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 colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive. Although it 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.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to help give your accounting business 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 mobile-friendly and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this theme:
Divi
(Divi)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
Go here for more details:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was created specifically to make corporate sites look good.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 unique unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 stunning themes.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This one was built to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investments or tax advice. The Adviser theme 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..
Go here for more information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms providing tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help establish 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 many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This one was designed specifically for firms that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, corporate, finance, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. This theme 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 options, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
For more information, 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
We hope that you have found this comprehensive guide on how to improve your accounting website using WordPress themes and plugins useful.
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