In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Basic Website Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Tips For Accountants – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will display in search results.
- 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 for better indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Web Traffic
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are also a number of WordPress plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web 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 (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin helps you run your own social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up and manage a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features to your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. Adding email newsletters] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
An effective way to attract subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for new services or products and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can select the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your site:
- 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 To Your Accounting Business Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Loans
- Tax
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides several customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Appearance customization features include colors, speed, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your site visitors calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on automotive loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, create PDF versions of your invoices, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, displaying 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple 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)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, 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 WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme)
This is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded using premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase 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. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This one is a child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s designed for accounting businesses. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, 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.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
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 specifically designed to 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 responsive and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and fast-loading.
Visit the theme site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any style of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily redesign the structure of their page without touching code.
(Divi WP Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 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 responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation was created specifically to make corporate sites look great.
The Corporation has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 unique 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 80+ professional themes.
For more information, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This one was built to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investments 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 multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those that provide tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help grow your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, 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
We hope that you have found this comprehensive guide on WordPress plugins & themes that can improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors useful.
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