In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Basic Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins
- WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Ways Of Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more visitors to your accounting site with WordPress plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- 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 lets you easily link internal content
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other search directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors 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 XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social networking community on your WordPress website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to run your own discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Use this plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Add An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It] provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for your content to be shared online with new prospective clients
An effective way to entice your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. Users can send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Maps
Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the more popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
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. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
The plugin provides several customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, font family, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful tool for calculating car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
It will display 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 WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF invoices, provide quotes, create 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, PayPal Payments Pro, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, access 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, CRM 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 like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting firms. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking 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 for WordPress is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can easily expand this theme using premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This one comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy Theme provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with your purchase.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
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 administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Visit this website to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for accountants. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, a variety of 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 plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about using this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting site a professional look while not looking dull. 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and loads fast.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WP Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include bar counter, blog, circle counter, divider, image, number counter, person, sidebar, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth header, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
For more information, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically created to create good-looking corporate websites.
It has a page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 different 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 full access to 80+ stunning themes.
Visit the theme site for more information about using this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
Adviser was specifically developed to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme 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..
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
Tax Help Theme was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It provides a range of 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 – WordPress Theme)
This one was designed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business 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, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a lot more.
Go here for more details:
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 article on ways to improve your accounting website with WordPress plugins and themes helpful.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
***