In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic With WordPress
- Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an important part of your business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins & themes that can improve SEO, improve user engagement and generate more visitors.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your article pages.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation With WordPress Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to run your own social networking community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Use the bbPress WordPress plugin to run a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social sharing features and buttons on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide them with high value information and offer them free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective customers to contact you. A contact form also allows readers to report issues, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
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 configure and lets you add multiple contact forms, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using 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 make available a range of functional tools for 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 the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display 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, page or post using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with loads of customizable features. 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.
Customize the appearance by changing speed, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating vehicle loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
It will show 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 WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin 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 that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification e-mail templates, view reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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, helpdesk with support ticketing management system, CRM and many added features.
(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 Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accountancy themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can customize this theme by installing premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included with the cost of purchase.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was created for accounting businesses. It offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, SEO friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting website a professional look while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a professional site using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with six color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This one was built to help those in the financial industry to build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investments or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
To learn more about about using this theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
Tax Help Theme was specifically developed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms that offer tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help establish your professional reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
To learn more about about this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme was designed for organizations that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, corporate, finance, insurance, 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, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and lots more.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
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 your business online using WordPress.
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