In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WordPress Plugins – Enhance Your Website’s Functionality
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WP Themes
Tips For Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins and themes that can improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more visitors.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available many plugins that will improve your accounting 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 (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you set up and manage your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we show you how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides many benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with others
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe is to provide them with content of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is 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)
This plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- CD
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with a number of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize it 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 colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for automotive loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
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 is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
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, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, single-page 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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 For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, client relationship management 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 like 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, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
Accounting Pro 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, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded by installing premium add-ons.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy has 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 engine optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included with the cost of purchasing.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is developed specifically for accounting services. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is 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.
Visit this site to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium 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., was specifically designed to help make your accounting website look professional 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 a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional site you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their pages without touching code.
(Divi Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has accordion, call to action, contact form, divider, image, map, person, slider, tabs, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is responsive and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme was developed specifically to make corporate websites look good.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It has six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was developed to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help grow your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Visit this website to learn more this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, 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, a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and lots more.
For more details about using this theme, visit the theme site:
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 SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your website with WordPress plugins & themes useful.
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