In Part 1 of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your accounting web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Services Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Essential Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation Using Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Improving Website Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section explores how to improve your website with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are loads 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.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add 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 images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below 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 to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can use 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 some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up and manage a social community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Run your own online discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with your users
- Provides you with another way for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is 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.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with several customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating automotive loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification 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 you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create 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 others.
WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, create 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, 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)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, 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)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. 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.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has 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-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can customize this theme through premium add-ons.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
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, many color choices, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is fully responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about about using this theme, visit the theme site:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements 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 fully responsive and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
For more information about this theme, visit this website:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme specifically designed 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 for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional website using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their page without editing any code.
(Divi WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include accordion, blog, code, divider, image, map, post title, sidebar, tabs, toggle, fullwidth header, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ stunning themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This one from Elegant Themes was created specifically to make corporate websites look good.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six different 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 all sleek business themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This one was designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more details about using this theme, visit this site:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
Tax Help Theme was specifically built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses providing tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help establish your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This one was built for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. The 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 settings, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
More information:
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 to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins & themes useful.
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