In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- WP Plugins – Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we will discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with new potential customers
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide users with valuable content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows users to provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
A map is a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
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 the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
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 want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers a number 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 create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, size, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating car loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, 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 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, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, display reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticketing system, CRM 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 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 and communicate with clients, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme developed 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, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized through premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
Accountancy comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with your purchase.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This one is designed for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, various color options, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was created to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to give your accounting business website a professional look. 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and loads fast.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
Divi
(Divi)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without touching any code.
(Divi WP Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include bar counter, blurb, circle counter, countdown timer, image, login, portfolio, sidebar, testimonial, video, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ professional themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme was specifically designed to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically built to help finance industry professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investments or tax help. 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 a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This one was designed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms providing tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WP Theme)
This premium theme was specifically designed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
Go here for 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
Hopefully, this guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins and themes that can help to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com
***