In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business presence online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Essential Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Features
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and run a social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you run a forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and give them something valuable for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Users can send feedback, contact 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 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 website
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some 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 For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. 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 pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several 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 create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customizations include width, height, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating automotive loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a 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)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
The plugin lets you add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, view 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket system, CRM and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients and invoicing, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoicing)
It integrates with several 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 for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accounting 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.
You can easily customize this theme by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. It provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the price.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is created specifically for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, various colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting business site a professional look 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 accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here to learn more this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built 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. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more details about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These 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. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
For more information about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was specifically developed to make corporate websites look great.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 different unique color schemes, 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 stunning themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was designed to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. Adviser 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.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help Theme was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that provide tax services. This theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help establish your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was specifically designed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. The 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, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a lot more.
More info:
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 business online using WordPress plugins and themes helpful.
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