In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your accounting business online, we covered the following topics:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins To Improve Your Website’s Capabilities
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of WP Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improving Your Business Online Using WordPress Plugins and Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages (posts) to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Create SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.
Improving SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are some fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up an online discussion forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter allows you to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without a third party subscription.
- Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s discuss now how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing user engagement
- Provides other ways for your content to be shared with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what is 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 popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that is easy to install and set up and allows you to add multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective customers can choose which topic they are contacting your company about. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are great tools for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily
- Display location of events
(Maps help your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve Your SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Financial Plugins For WordPress
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 users. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
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 a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And many 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 show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin offers a number of customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing speed, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating vehicle loans, property, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
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 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.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 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 notification e-mail templates, viewing 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 system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional 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 customers, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can customize Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy Theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. The price includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Visit the theme site to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built for accountants. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various colors, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive. Although this theme could easily suit 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.
Visit this website to learn more about this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help make your accounting business site look professional 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 CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
For more details, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
Divi is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and edit the structure of their page without touching code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has bar counter, blurb, code, email optin, image, number counter, portfolio, slider, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
Visit this site for more details about this theme:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically created to make corporate sites look good.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, multiple page templates that 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 stunning themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
Go here for more details:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those offering 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 additional custom shortcodes.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
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 ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and generate more traffic with WordPress plugins & themes useful.
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