In Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Services
- Your Web Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Ways Of Improving Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available a number of plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some more powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use BuddyPress to set up an online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with information of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also lets visitors provide feedback, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for users
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Clients can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Financial WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services website to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This is a free collection of over 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 them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin includes several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include width, height, scroll speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, text color, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for automotive loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
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 WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and 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 notification email templates, accessing 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 complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Client 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 WP Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
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 a whole lot more.
You can easily customize this theme through premium add-ons.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This one 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, SEO friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme was developed specifically for accounting businesses. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, a variety of color options, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is fully responsive. Although it can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information about this WordPress theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress 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., is designed specifically to give your accounting site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a professional website using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their page without editing code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes audio player, call to action, code, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, map, person, slider, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed to make corporate websites look good.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, 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 professional themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investments or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Visit the theme site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
Tax Help was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was specifically built for organizations that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and lots more.
For more information, 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
Hopefully, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn ways to improve SEO, improve user engagement and increase traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
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