In Part One of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting Profession
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Basic Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Improve Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:
Ways Of Improving Web Traffic
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways to improve your accounting website with WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages (posts) for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that search engines will display.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link internal content
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are many plugins for WordPress that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to set up a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s discuss now ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries.
Adding A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It] provides many benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared online with new prospective customers
An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let users send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide several benefits including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Convenience for visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Add Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your website also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their meeting or appointments
- Displays location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
Accounting WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just 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 posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- Mortgage
- Rate of return
- Leases
- Credit
- And many 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 Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can add custom stock tickers to any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
The plugin includes loads of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for individual categories.
Appearance customizations include width, height, scroll speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font family, text color, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin)
This free calculator allows users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating automotive loans, real estate loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification 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 WP Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin integrates billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, create quotes, create single-page 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 many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, showing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification email templates, viewing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing management system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application WP Plugin – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
iBilling integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting Themes For WordPress
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting 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, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
You can expand this theme with premium add-ons.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This one has a variety of styles and layouts to make your accounting site look and feel professional.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, and more. It’s lightweight, search optimized, fast loading, and fully responsive. Accountancy provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase price includes free updates and 1 year of support.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme was created for accounting services. It allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and comes with a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, various color choices, is easy to use, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although it could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This theme was created to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements designed specifically to help give your accounting website a professional look without looking dull. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive (mobile-friendly) and includes pages for your services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme specifically designed for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
Divi is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily 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. It has bar counter, blurb, circle counter, email optin, filterable portfolio, login, post title, sidebar, social media follow, video slider, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. It is responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all themes.
To learn more about about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This one was specifically developed to make corporate websites look good.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It has 6 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 full access to all themes.
Visit this site to learn more this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investments or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, widgets and multiple shortcodes, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This theme was built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses offering tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way and help build your professional reputation. It has a range of blog styles, uses the 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 any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. This theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and lots more.
To learn more about this WordPress 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 how to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your accounting website using plugins.
Subscribe below to receive 101+ useful WordPress tips that will help you grow your business …
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
***