In Part One of this article on ways to grow your accounting business online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accounting Businesses
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Services
- Improving Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Tips For Accountants – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your articles and posts.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With Plugins
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your accounting 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 fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Run an online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – Run a forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your website.
- Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides a number of benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides practical tips and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving interaction
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared online with other potential customers
A proven way to attract subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and give them something for free in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. A contact form also allows visitors to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions for improvements and more.
A contact form provides several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This plugin allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective clients can choose which aspect of your business they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Some of the most popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Leases
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of 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 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker comes with loads of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. 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 WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on car loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It even 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, quoting, single-page 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 several others.
You can 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 e-mail notification templates, display 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 Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin 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 WP Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can own 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 an inexpensive turn-key theme developed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers 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 a whole lot more.
You can expand Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
For more information about this theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This one has a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included with the cost of purchasing.
Go here for more information:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for accounting services. Kathryn comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, many color options, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it 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.
For more details, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed to exude 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 business site look professional while not 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme designed specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It also 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 info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a unique, professional site 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 anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include bar counter, call to action, circle counter, email optin, image, login, portfolio, sidebar, testimonial, toggle, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ professional themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This one from Elegant Themes was specifically built to create good-looking corporate websites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, 6 unique 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 full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
Go here for more info:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed to help finance industry professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investing or tax help. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and firms that provide tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help grow your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here to learn more this WordPress theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This one was developed specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
For more information, 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, you have found this comprehensive guide on how to improve your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress useful.
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