In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- Basic Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes
Tips For Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages
- Post Notification – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Business Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing engagement with users
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a great tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Accounting Services Website Using WordPress Plugins
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting site to immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, opacity, scroll speed, number of stocks displayed at one time, typeface, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating automotive loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin 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 the WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoice)
The plugin supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress 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 WordPress themes available for accounting firms. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded through premium add-ons.
Go here for more information about this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included with your purchase.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accountants. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
Accounting WordPress Theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to make your accounting site look professional without looking dull. 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 form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional site you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi WP Theme – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include accordion, blurb, circle counter, divider, image, login, portfolio, slider, tabs, video slider, fullwidth image, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Visit this site to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was developed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 unique different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust online through clean design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investment advice or tax help. Adviser 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..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This one was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses providing tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally and help build your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business was specifically developed for firms that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a whole lot 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, you have found this guide on ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins useful.
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