In Part 1 of this comprehensive guide on ways to grow your accounting business online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accounting & Financial Businesses
- Opportunities For Accountants
- Basic Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Website With Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic Using Plugins
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO)
There are many ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – title your images with keywords for better search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better indexing of your web pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increasing User Engagement And Driving More Visitors
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve your accounting or financial services site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin helps you set up your own social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own discussion forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social sharing features to your website.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we’ll discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- 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 provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for user engagement
- Provides you with an additional way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide them with high value information and give them additional items of value for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option to consider is to segment your contact form so prospects can choose the department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your site also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just 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. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin installs a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets your users calculate indicative repayments. This is a great tool for automotive loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
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)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, display 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 Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing management system, client relationship management and many more features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has 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.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help make your accounting website look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WP Theme)
This premium theme was designed specifically for accounting businesses. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, various colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help make your accounting website look professional 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 services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using the page builder or 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 easily redesign the structure of their pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi WP Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, blurb, contact form, email optin, filterable portfolio, map, portfolio, shop, social media follow, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all professional themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was designed specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 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 access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
Go here to learn more this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
The Adviser Theme was specifically developed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically built for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way 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, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
Finance Business Theme was developed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a whole lot more.
For more details 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, this article has helped you learn ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and increase traffic to your accounting or financial services site generation with WordPress plugins.
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