In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting web presence, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Digital Economy
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Website Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase 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 – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and run your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up and run your own forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with new prospective customers
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with valuable content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a special report, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Visitors can send feedback, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Accounting Website
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin gives you a widget that displays a number of 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 WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
This plugin includes several customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font family, font size, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send 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 lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
WP-Invoice 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 email notification templates, access 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 For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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 WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. 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 Theme)
This premium 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily customize this theme through premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This premium theme comes in a variety of 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, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and fast loading. 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 Theme For WordPress)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more information about this theme, visit this website:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is created specifically for accountants. It has 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 engine friendly, 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 plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was specifically designed to give your accounting website a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a free corporate theme developed for professional service providers 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 and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create any type of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without touching code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes bar counter, call to action, contact form, email optin, filterable portfolio, map, post title, shop, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
It has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Visit this site to learn more about this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investment advice or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help Theme was built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that provide tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally to help grow your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more details:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business was designed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a lot more.
For more details, 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 guide on ways of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more traffic with plugins useful.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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