In Part One of this guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
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 lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress can be used to run your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Run an online community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add powerful social sharing features to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
This section covers how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared around with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with valuable information and give them something for free in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also allow users to report issues, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to add multiple contact forms to your site, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Show 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 For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes 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 sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
The plugin offers a number of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customization features include speed, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free calculator allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, provide quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, USAePay, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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 solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoicing)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, 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, 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 – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy firms. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, 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 Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This theme offers 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, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in your purchase.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for accounting services. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you want it to, 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.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to help give your accounting business site 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 a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
Go here for more information:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create any type of professional website you want 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 you to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without editing any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 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. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 themes.
For more details about this WordPress theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six unique different 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 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This one was specifically built to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Visit the theme website to learn more about using this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those offering tax services. This theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was specifically developed for organizations that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It 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 features, animated elements, and lots 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
Hopefully, you have found this guide on WordPress plugins & themes that can help improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic helpful.
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