In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to improve your accounting business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accountants
- How To Improve Your Website Pages
- Tips On How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Creating Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Features
- WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of WordPress Themes
Tips For Improving Website Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO Using WordPress
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – Set 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 your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Website
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
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 (lists all of your pages and posts for indexing by search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – BuddyPress allows you to run your own social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin lets you set up and manage a discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(You can easily add social features to your website with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
This section covers ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared around with other prospective clients
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for handling finances, 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. Visitors can raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage 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.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides visitors with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and customers can plan their visits better
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
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. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Equity
- 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 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
The plugin offers loads of customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, speed, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful financial tool for calculating car loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
It will show 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-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through 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 clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and several others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, displaying 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as 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 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 Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster by integrating 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, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accountancy firms. With the themes below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WordPress Theme)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can customize this theme with premium add-ons.
Go here for more info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy Theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here for more info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically 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 colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to exude 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 business 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 services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any type of professional website you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has audio player, blurb, code, email optin, gallery, map, portfolio, shop, testimonial, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all sleek business themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically created to make corporate websites look good.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also comes with 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 full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built to help finance industry professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax help. The Adviser theme 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.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help WordPress Theme was specifically built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses offering tax assistance. It’s designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help grow your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This one was specifically designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, 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 settings, color management, animations, and a whole 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
We hope that you have found this guide on ways to improve your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress useful.
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