In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your accounting business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Site
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Capabilities
- WP For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes
Improving Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available many plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you run your own social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section will show you ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for subscribers to share your content
An effective way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Users can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets 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
- Convenience for users
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to create multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which topic they are contacting your company about. This helps visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a great tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Here are 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
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Accounting Or Financial Services Site Using Plugins
WordPress Plugins - Accounting
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting 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 Plugin For WordPress)
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
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers a number of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for automotive loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both 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 others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, viewing 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing management system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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 customer data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With the themes listed below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
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 (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily expand this theme through premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This inexpensive theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The cost of purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accountants. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, SEO friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to 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 services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional website using the 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 redesign the structure of their pages without touching any code.
(Divi WP Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to create great-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional 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. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more details:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was developed to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investment advice or tax advice. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those offering tax assistance. It’s designed to show your services professionally to help grow 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.
For more information, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a lot more.
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, this comprehensive guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins for improving SEO, better user engagement and generating more web traffic.
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