In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Tips For Accountants – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Plugins and Themes
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 Site For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up your own social networking community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress allows you to set up your own community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for subscribers to share your content
A proven way to attract newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something 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.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps plan their appointments better
- Shows location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing size, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for vehicle loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.
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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoices, provide 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, and others.
You can add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, display reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, 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 client data and invoicing, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have 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 for WordPress is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can expand Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
Accountancy offers a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.
Visit the theme site for more details about using this theme:
Accounting
(Accounting 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 with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium WordPress theme was developed for accounting services. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, various color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme can easily fit any profession, 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 premium theme for WordPress was designed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting business website a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s mobile-friendly and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and loads fast.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and change the structure of their page without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes accordion, blurb, code, divider, image, number counter, post title, pricing table, tabs, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all sleek business themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation Theme was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, six unique different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
Adviser was designed to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean design. It’s ideal 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 built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those providing tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way and help grow your professional reputation. It comes with 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 Theme For WordPress)
Finance Business was designed specifically for organizations that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
Go here for 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
Hopefully, you have found this guide on WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and driving more visitors to your accounting website useful.
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