In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting Profession
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Digital Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Improve Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines With WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up and manage an online social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Use this WordPress plugin to add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(You can add social features to your website easily with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared with others
A proven way to attract subscribers to your email newsletter is to provide them with information of high value and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let visitors send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives 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
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the department they want to contact. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Map
A map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you easily and clients can plan their visits better
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Accounting Or Financial Services Site With Plugins
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WP Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers several customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual 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 plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for calculating car loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification 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 integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients 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 invoice versions, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and several others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, displaying 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 For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports international 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software 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 suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with 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 lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized through premium add-ons.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included with the price.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This one 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, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for accountants. The theme comes with 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, search engine optimized, and is responsive. 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 is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is specifically designed to help give your accounting website a professional look. 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 accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built 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. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is fully responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all stunning themes.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was specifically built to make corporate websites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It has six color schemes. It also comes with 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 access to all beautifully-designed themes.
For more information about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
Adviser was specifically designed to help finance industry professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services like investing advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WP Theme)
Tax Help was built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services professionally to help grow your business 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.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, 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 options, color management, animated elements, and lots more.
Visit this site to learn more about using this theme:
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 guide has helped you learn how to improve your website with WordPress plugins and themes.
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