In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Tips For Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post 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 – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – 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 business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – This plugin lets you run your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also lets readers provide feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – 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 post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin provides loads of customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customizations include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends 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 a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with 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 clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying 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 Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like 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 customers and invoicing, track 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 For WordPress – Client Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With these themes you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is an inexpensive 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 (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy 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, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with your purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This 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 header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s developed specifically for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was designed to exude 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 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 (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate 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. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a unique, professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily 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 modules such as audio player, call to action, circle counter, email optin, image, number counter, person, shop, social media follow, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation Theme was built specifically to make corporate sites look great.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help Theme was developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms offering tax services. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help grow your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Visit the theme site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This one was developed specifically for businesses that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a lot more.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
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 WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and generating more visitors to your website helpful.
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