In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Businesses
- Basic Web Pages
- Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic
- Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Generating More Visitors
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website Using Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines
There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the URL of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that search engines will show in their search result pages.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your website.
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available dozens of plugins that improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s SEO)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some powerful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run a social network on your website.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – E-Newsletter lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features to your site.
(You can add social sharing buttons to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to retain and grow your readership. It] provides several benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional ways for your content to be shared with other prospective customers
An effective strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to courses, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Users can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, send suggestions for new services or products and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits, like:
- Reducing 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
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert multiple contact forms into any page on your site, customize the form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
Contact Form 7 also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so users can choose which topic they want to discuss. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Visitors can find you more easily and helps customers can plan their visits better
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and customers find you)
Here are just some 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
Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins
Accounting – WordPress Plugins
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Debit
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes)
This plugin lets you add a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes loads of customizable features. You can choose from built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Appearance customization features include height, width, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, text color, font size, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on auto loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The Finance Calculator plugin 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)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, 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 notification email templates, access 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 complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports multiple 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 Plugin For WordPress)
iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Invoice)
It integrates with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Financial Themes
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be customized using premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy has a variety of built-in 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, SEO friendly, fast loading, and is responsive. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the price.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive. It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here for more information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created specifically for accountants. It comes with multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, SEO friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
For more information, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP 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 specifically designed to 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 mobile-friendly and includes pages for your services, contact details section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials section, and a blog.
Go here for more info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create any kind of professional website you want using the page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their page without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed to create good-looking corporate sites.
It has a sleek page-based home page design with a nice slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with six color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ professional themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This premium theme was developed to help those in the financial industry to build trust online through clean design. It’s ideal 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..
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
Tax Help Theme was designed for financial companies, tax and finance advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. This theme is designed to show your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It provides a range of blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This theme was developed specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, finance, insurance, corporate, accounting, loans, and more. Finance Business includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and lots more.
Go here for more details:
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 comprehensive guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins & themes that can help to improve SEO, improve user engagement and drive more visitors.
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
***