In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- How To Improve Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Your Accounting Website – Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss how to improve your accounting website with WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to optimize your website for search engines:
- SEO-Friendly – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Post Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
- Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available also a number of plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your site’s SEO)
Other things you can do to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more fantastic WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This plugin lets you set up and run your own social networking community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Add social sharing features and buttons to your pages and posts.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)
Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section, we’ll look at ways to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that could save businesses time and money
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide users with information of high value and offer them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch. Users can report concerns, contact specific departments, request a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This plugin allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Another feature you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective customers can select the department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps plan their trips better
- Display location of events
(Adding a map 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 And Themes That Can Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post using shortcodes.
This plugin provides a number of customizable features. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customizations include colors, speed, text, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows your site visitors to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating auto loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 is ideal for WordPress users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It even 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, create PDF 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, and many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, creating pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, 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 complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. 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 premium theme for WordPress 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, a custom menu feature, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can easily customize this theme by installing premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and fast loading. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accountants. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, various color options, is easy to use, SEO friendly, and is fully responsive. Although it can easily fit 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 information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was developed with the idea of 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 site look professional while not looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and loads fast.
Visit this site to learn more about this theme:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and change the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as bar counter, blog, contact form, countdown timer, image, map, portfolio, pricing table, tabs, video, fullwidth code, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
The Corporation Theme from Elegant Themes was specifically created to make corporate websites look great.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design. It has six color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
Adviser was designed to help finance industry professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investments or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more details, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
Tax Help was developed specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses offering tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help establish your business reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This theme was designed specifically for firms that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. Finance Business 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a 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, you have found this article on ways to improve your accounting business online using WordPress helpful.
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