In Part 1 of this step-by-step article on ways to grow your accounting business presence online, we covered the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting Profession
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Digital Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Web Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Overview Of Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Traffic
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages (called posts).
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you 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 descriptions for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily link internal content
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic To Your Website Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
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 (lists all of your pages for search engines)
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can use to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run a community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add powerful social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
This section covers how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides another way for readers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting new subscribers to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for readers to get in touch. Users can provide feedback, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides several benefits, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose which department they want to contact. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map improves local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps plan their trips better
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Accounting Or Financial Services Site With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical 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 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- Leases
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers loads of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customization features include size, text, colors, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin allows users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a useful financial tool for calculating automotive loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include showing payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin For WordPress)
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, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into WP’s user management database to keep track of your clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, 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, 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 support ticketing system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful 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)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage and communicate with customers, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting firms. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized with premium add-ons.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This one comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, loads fast, and fully responsive. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. The price includes free updates and one year of support.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this website:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Go here for more details about using this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This premium theme was designed for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color options, is easy to use, search optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Visit the theme website for more details about this theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
Accounting WordPress Theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help make your accounting site look professional 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 accounting services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate 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 using this theme, visit the theme website:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. You can create a unique, professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi WP Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. It has multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
Go here for more details:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was specifically designed to make corporate sites look good.
This theme has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design. It has 6 unique color schemes. It also has 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 all stunning themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was specifically developed to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. The theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This one was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses providing tax services. It’s designed to showcase your services professionally and help build your professional reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
Go here for more information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and a whole lot more.
To learn more 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 your accounting business online using WordPress plugins and themes.
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