In Part One of this comprehensive article on ways to build your accounting business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting & Financial Businesses Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Generating More Visitors To Your Website
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
How To Improve Traffic
Web traffic is a vital part of your business growth. This section explores ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors with plugins.
Optimize Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display in their search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content 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 search directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your site’s search engine optimization:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can 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 visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Use this plugin to set up and run an online community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your site.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss how to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for readers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with high value information and give them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This can be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to contact you. Contact forms also let users report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:
- Reducing 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 post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and allows you to insert multiple contact forms to your pages and posts, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so users can choose which topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Adding A Map
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your site also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and helps clients can plan their visits better
- Show location of events
(Adding a map to your site 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 That Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
WordPress Plugins
WordPress makes available 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 some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Debit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customizations include height, width, scroll speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, font family, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for calculating repayments on automotive loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification 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 WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send 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 business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, 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 lets you add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, display 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with clients, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Client Invoicing)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress 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 look at some of the best themes themes available for accounting. With the themes below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy 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, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This premium theme for WordPress offers a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the price.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accountants. The theme offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, many colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, 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 slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more information about this WordPress theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was developed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and elements designed specifically to help give your accounting 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 accounting services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. You can create any style of professional site you want using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their page without editing any code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These modules include accordion, blurb, contact form, divider, gallery, login, portfolio, sidebar, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth map, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ sleek business themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically developed to make corporate sites look great.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design. It has six different 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 full access to over 80 professional themes.
Go here to learn more about this theme:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This one was built specifically to help finance professionals build trust online through clean web design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme was designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and businesses providing tax services. The theme is designed to showcase your services professionally and help build your business reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium theme was built for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
More info:
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 WordPress plugins for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
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