In Part One of this article on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Digital Economy
- Basic Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Improve Web Traffic
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using WordPress Plugins
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improving Your Business Online With WordPress Themes And Plugins
Web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, we discuss ways of improving your business online with WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your article pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose an excerpt that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for better search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Post Notification – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)
Other WordPress plugins you can use to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use this WordPress plugin to set up and run your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – Run your own online forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – use this WordPress plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your posts and pages.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with WordPress plugins)
Generating More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Add A Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. Adding an email newsletter provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Keeps readers updated
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the best ways to get visitors to subscribe is to provide them with valuable content and give them a free gift in exchange for their details. This could be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Add Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Readers can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so prospective customers can choose which department they want to contact. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Add A Map
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your website also provides many benefits, such as:
- Maps help to increase local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your website helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins & Themes
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting or financial services site to immediately add a range of practical tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
This plugin comes with several customizable ticker. You can choose to use 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, scroll speed, background color, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows your visitors to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for calculating automotive loans, real estate, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
This plugin 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, 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, and others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, ten 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)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoice)
The plugin supports multiple 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 – WordPress Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage customer data and invoicing, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Invoicing)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. With these themes you can 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 WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme built for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and lots more.
Accounting Pro can be expanded with premium add-ons.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme. The cost of purchasing includes free updates and 1 year of support.
More information:
Accounting
(Accounting WP 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 and custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn)
This one is built for accounting businesses. The theme offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is fully responsive. Although this theme could easily suit 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.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WP Theme)
This premium 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 specifically designed to give your accounting website a professional look. 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 section, and a blog.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This 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. It includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean-looking and fast-loading.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a professional site using its page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without touching 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 accordion, blurb, circle counter, divider, image, map, portfolio, slider, social media follow, text, fullwidth image, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
For more details, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically to make corporate websites look great.
The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, six unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all stunning themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser WP Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically developed to help those in the financial industry to build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
More information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This one was built specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and businesses that offer tax assistance. The theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help grow your business 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)
Finance Business WordPress Theme was designed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, accounting, loans, 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 features, animations, 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, you have found this article on ways of improving SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your accounting or financial services website using plugins and themes helpful.
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