In Part 1 of this article on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Online Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Site Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Extend Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that will display in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- 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, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – bbPress helps you run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Add social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can easily add social sharing to your website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for user engagement
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared with new prospective clients
A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. A contact form also lets readers report issues, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Is convenient for site visitors
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 lets you add multiple contact forms on your website, customize your form and the mail 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 prospective customers can select which topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- They improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Shows location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins For Accounting Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Leases
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating forms that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send 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, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, USAePay, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, viewing 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoice)
The plugin 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, 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 – Client Invoice)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting 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.
Accounting Pro can be customized with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the price.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built for accounting services. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, SEO friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was built with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to help give your accounting site 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 services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a corporate theme developed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more information:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional site you want using the page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify 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 code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include bar counter, blog, code, email optin, gallery, map, portfolio, shop, social media follow, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation WordPress Theme was developed specifically to make corporate websites look great.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 different 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.
Visit this website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was specifically built to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. The 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.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This one was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those providing tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally and help build your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically designed for businesses that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and lots more.
Go here for more details:
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 article has helped you learn ways of improving your business online with WordPress plugins and themes.
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