In Part One of this article on ways to improve your accounting business web presence, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Services Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Services
- Your Website Pages
- Ways To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your accounting website using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you set up and manage a social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide high value information and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular WordPress 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 configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can select which topic they want to discuss. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular Google Maps 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 Drive More Visitors With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin offers a number of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include speed, text, colours, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful financial tool for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
It will display payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both 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, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, view 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 WP Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as 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 customer data 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 – Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting firms. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers 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.
You can easily expand this theme by installing premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase price includes free updates and one year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This one 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, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium WordPress theme was created for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was created to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to make your accounting business website look professional while not 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.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
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. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and loads fast.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a unique, professional site using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify 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 editing any code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was created specifically to make corporate sites look great.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six different color schemes. It also has 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 access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was specifically built to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investing advice or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was specifically built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. This theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help build your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This theme was specifically designed for organizations that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a lot more.
Go here to learn more this theme:
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 how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and increase web traffic to your accounting or financial services site generation with plugins.
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