In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Improving Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improving Web Traffic
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Overview Of Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving search engine optimization, increase user engagement and increase web traffic generation with WordPress plugins & themes.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more 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 (lists all of your posts and pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run an online social network on your website.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage a discussion forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This plugin lets you add social sharing features and buttons to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
This section covers ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides additional ways for readers to share your content
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide them with high value content and offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- 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)
This free plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another feature to consider is to segment your contact form so users can choose the topic they are contacting your company about. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Provide Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and customers can plan their appointments better
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors To Your Accounting Website
WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for site visitors. 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 400+ calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Leases
- Credit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This free plugin lets you place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
This plugin provides several customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colors, size, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for auto loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate 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, 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, accessing 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 ticketing management system, CRM and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoices, 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 integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting – WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting businesses. With these themes you can own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme built 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 with premium add-ons.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine friendly, and fast loading. It 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 WordPress Theme)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically for accounting businesses. The theme comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically 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, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built specifically for professionals 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 employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
More info:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or 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 web pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ professional themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to make corporate sites look good.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to all stunning themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This theme was developed to help finance professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investment advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help WordPress Theme was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses offering tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services professionally to help build your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and lots more.
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, this guide has helped you learn ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins.
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