In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips On How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores ways of improving your business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available dozens of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run a social community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with another way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing your visitors to subscribe is to provide users with high value information and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and lets you add multiple contact forms to your website, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can choose the aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding Maps
Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular 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
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available 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 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Leases
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin includes several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customization features include speed, symbols, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets your users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for automotive loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification 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)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. 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 – 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, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily customize Accounting Pro by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
Accountancy Theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accounting businesses. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, a variety of color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more details:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme 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 and includes pages for your accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WP Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their page without touching a single line of code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has bar counter, call to action, contact form, email optin, image, map, post title, sidebar, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This theme was specifically created to make corporate websites look great.
It has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This one was specifically built to help finance professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing advice or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more information about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms offering tax assistance. This theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help grow your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
To learn more about this theme, visit this site:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This one was developed for firms that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a lot more.
Go here for more info:
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 that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more traffic useful.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
***