Grow Your Accounting Business Online With WordPress – 2

In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your accounting business web presence, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:

• Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
• Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
• Basic Pages
• Ways To Improve Your Web Content

In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:

• Improving Traffic
• Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
• WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Website

To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, go here:

• Using WordPress Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Features And Functionality
• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Ways To Improve Website Traffic With WordPress

Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section, we discuss ways to improve search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more visitors to your accounting website with WordPress plugins.

Optimizing Your Site For SEO Using WordPress

There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:

• Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
• Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your article pages for.
• Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
• Excerpts – Set descriptions for your posts that will appear in search results.
• Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
• Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
• Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your website.

Improving Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Visitors To Your Website Generation Using Plugins

As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.

Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:

• Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• Page-List – WordPress site map plugin

(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO)

Other ways to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are a few WordPress plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – This free plugin can be used to set up and manage a social network on your site.
• bbPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a community forum on your site.
• E-Newsletter – Use this WordPress plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring 3rd-party subscriptions.
• Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
• Monarch – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your pages and posts.

(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your site with WordPress plugins)

Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications

In this section we’ll discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.

Provide A Newsletter

Adding a newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding newsletters] provides several benefits, like:

• Sends targeted traffic
• Keeps readers from forgetting about you
• Provides practical tips and advice
• Provides you with a targeted marketing channel
• It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
• Increases user engagement
• Provides you with additional ways for subscribers to share your content

An effective strategy for getting your visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be a useful report, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.

Contact Forms

A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch with you. Visitors can send 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 including:

• Reducing spam
• Set up automated responses
• Giving you control over what gets sent to you
• You can keep your email address private
• Contact forms can be added to any post or page
• Looks professional
• Is convenient for site visitors

One of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7)

This free plugin lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.

Something else to consider is to add sections to your contact form so visitors can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.

Adding Maps

Maps help your visitors and clients find you.

A map is a useful tool for several reasons:

• They help to improve local SEO
• Visitors can find your office easily and helps clients can plan their appointments better
• Show location of events

(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)

Below are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your website:

• Google Maps
• Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
• WP Google Maps
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors Using Plugins

Accounting WordPress Plugins

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.

Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:

• Interest rate
• Payments
• Leases
• Credit
• And lots more

Go here for more information:

• Calculators Pro WordPress Plugin

Show Stock Quotes

(Show Stock Quotes)

This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.

(Show Stock Quotes – Stock Portfolio)

Go here to learn more about using this WordPress plugin:

• Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress

Custom Stock Ticker

(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)

With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.

The plugin provides a number of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.

Appearance customization features include speed, text, colours, etc.

Go here for more information:

• Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin

Finance Calculator

(Finance Calculator)

This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating car loans, property, or any other large loan.

(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)

This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to a specified email address.

It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form that can be placed in any page or post.

For more details, go here:

• Finance Calculator WP Plugin

WP-Invoice

(WP-Invoice WP Plugin)

WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.

This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF versions of invoices, provide quotes, create 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 PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.

WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, view reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, valuable clients and top grossing line items), and more.

To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site:

• WP-Invoice WP Plugin

All In One Business Management Application

(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin)

This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticket system, CRM and lots more.

(All In One Business Management Application WordPress Plugin – Invoice)

All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, notice board, and more.

Go here to learn more about this plugin:

• All In One Business Management Application

iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software

(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin)

iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoicing, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.

(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)

iBilling Accounting and Billing Software integrates with several payment gateways.

For more information, go here:

• iBilling

Accounting Themes For WordPress

To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.

Accounting Pro

(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)

This premium theme is a turn-key theme built for accountants and accounting firms. It’s a responsive theme with a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and lots more.

You can easily customize this theme using premium add-ons.

For more information, go here:

• Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme

Accountancy

(Accountancy Theme)

This theme comes in a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.

This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. It provides what your business needs without bloating your theme. Your purchase includes free updates and 1 year of support.

More information:

• Accountancy – WordPress Theme

Accounting

(Accounting Theme)

Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.

More info:

• Accounting – WordPress Theme

Kathryn

(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)

This one is designed specifically for accountants. Kathryn offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many color options, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although it 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.

For more details, go here:

• Kathryn Theme

Accounting WordPress Theme

(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)

This one was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements designed specifically to give your accounting business site a professional look while not 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.

Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:

• Accounting WordPress Theme WordPress Premium Theme

WP Advocate

(WP Advocate)

WP Advocate is a free corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the 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 and fast-loading theme.

To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:

• WP Advocate

Divi

(Divi Theme For WordPress)

This premium WordPress theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.

The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without touching code.

(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)

Divi 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. Divi is responsive and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ stunning themes.

More info:

• Divi Theme For WordPress

The Corporation

(The Corporation Theme)

This theme was specifically created to make corporate websites look great.

The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, six different color schemes, 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 80+ stunning themes.

For more details, go here:

• The Corporation

Adviser

(Adviser Theme For WordPress)

This one was developed specifically to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..

For more details, go here:

• Adviser WordPress Theme

Tax Help

(Tax Help WordPress Theme)

This one was developed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and firms that provide tax assistance. This theme is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build 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.

Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:

• Tax Help Theme

Finance Business

(Finance Business)

This theme was built for firms that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animated elements, and a whole lot more.

More info:

• Finance Business

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 guide has helped you learn ways to improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation using WordPress plugins and themes.

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