In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to grow your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Website With Plugins
- WP For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors using WordPress plugins.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster indexing of your content
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress development community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use this plugin to set up and manage a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared around with new prospective clients
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a time-saving guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch with you. Users can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select which topic they are contacting you about. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your WordPress site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- Maps improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get 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)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides loads 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 add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on 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 a specified email address.
It will display 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 is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with 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 your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, display 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With the themes listed below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
Accounting Pro is an inexpensive turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily customize this theme through premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy offers a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in the price.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built specifically for accountants. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (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 plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help give your accounting business site a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a free corporate theme built 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 and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and fast-loading.
Visit this site to learn more about using this theme:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a professional website using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and change the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – 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 responsive and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six different color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Visit this website to learn more about this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This theme was specifically built for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally to help establish your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was designed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, 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
We hope that you have found this article on ways of improving your accounting or financial services website with WordPress useful.
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