In Part One of this guide on ways to build your accounting business presence online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Online Business Tips For Accountants – Improve Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress plugin to set up and manage your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding a newsletter provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting new subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a special report, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let users raise concerns, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for users
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can select the department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
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 like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides a number of customizable ticker. Choose from 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 specific categories.
Appearance customization features include height, width, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, font family, font size, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating vehicle loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a 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 WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out 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, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice lets you 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 notification e-mail templates, access 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)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoicing)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose 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 own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers 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 with premium add-ons.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps 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 fast loading. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WP Theme)
Kathryn is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s designed for accounting services. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, many colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit 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.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to make your accounting business website look professional without 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, call to action, code, email optin, gallery, login, person, shop, testimonial, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ professional themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was specifically built to make corporate websites look good.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 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 full access to all themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investments or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses providing tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme was specifically built for organizations that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. It 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, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a lot more.
Go here for 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 of improving search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins useful.
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