In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Accounting Services Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Improve Traffic Using WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your business growth. This section discusses ways to improve your accounting business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines (SEO) With WordPress
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster page indexing
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run an online social community on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own online forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – This WordPress plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can add social sharing to your website easily using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
In this section we will show you ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Provide An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for increasing interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
A proven strategy for enticing visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users additional bonuses for free in exchange for their personal details. This could be a guide, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to contact you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages, 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 post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenience for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something else to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They increase local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their visits or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some of the more popular 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
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins For Accounting Services
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Leases
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows 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 Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
This plugin offers several customizable features. Choose from built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for automotive loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
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 WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out 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 from clients, create PDF versions of invoices, create quotes, create 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 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, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, view 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 Plugin For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoicing)
iBilling lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accountancy businesses. With these themes you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
You can customize Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
Go here for more details:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and loads fast. Accountancy provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the price.
Visit the theme website to learn more about this theme:
Accounting
(Accounting)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
To learn more about about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework built for accounting businesses. It has a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, flexible rotator, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. 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 info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built 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 without looking dull. 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 services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
To learn more about about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their pages without touching a single line of code.
(Divi Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 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 fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation was designed specifically to make corporate websites look great.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all stunning themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This one was specifically designed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax help. It 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 Theme For WordPress)
Tax Help was designed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that provide tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services in a professional way and help grow your professional reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
This premium WordPress theme was designed for organizations that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred 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 lots more.
Go here for 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you learn WordPress plugins & themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and generating more traffic.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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