In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to grow your accounting business online, we provided many practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
- Your Website Pages
- Improve The Content On Your Website
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Tips For Improving Web Traffic With WordPress
- Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With Plugins
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WP Plugins To Enhance Your Website’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Contents
Improving Website Traffic With WordPress
Your web traffic is a vital part of your online business growth. This section discusses ways of improving your accounting website using WordPress plugins and themes.
Optimizing Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO:
- URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – Set up your WordPress site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Site With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social features. Here are a few useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up a social community on your site.
- bbPress – Set up your own community forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard, without requiring a 3rd party subscription.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add social sharing features on your website.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
Let’s now take a look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a list of subscribers. It] provides several benefits including:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides additional opportunities for your content to be shared online with others
One of the best ways to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value content and give users free gifts in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Readers can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- More convenient for users
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin)
This free plugin is easy to install and set up and allows you to create and manage multiple contact forms on 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 supported.
Another feature you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This will help you to get the comment to the right person.
Maps
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps (e.g. Google Maps), with your website also provides visitors with a number of benefits, such as:
- A map increases local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Display location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some 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
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Driving More Traffic
WordPress Plugins - Accounting Businesses
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for visitors. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of over 400 calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Loans
- Tax
- Credit
- And many more
More information: Calculators Pro WP Plugin
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin gives you a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
Visit the plugin site for more details about this WordPress plugin: Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable ticker. You can choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, size, speed, text, and symbols, etc.
More information: Custom Stock Ticker
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments. This is a great financial tool for auto loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – Loan Calculators)
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 displaying payment protection, calculating 12 to 60 months loans and creating a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more information, go here: Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with both free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into the WP 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, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating e-mail notification templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 most valuable clients and top grossing line items), and more..
Go here for more info: WP-Invoice Plugin
All In One Business Management Application
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, notice board, and more.
For more information, go here: All In One Business Management Application
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage client data and invoicing, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software
WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With the themes listed below you can have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This is a turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with 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.
You can customize Accounting Pro using premium add-ons.
More info: Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
This one comes with a variety of built-in styles and layouts that helps 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 fast loading. Accountancy provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included with your purchase.
More information: Accountancy WordPress Theme
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress 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 admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More information: Accounting – WordPress Theme
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
This premium theme for WordPress was created for accounting services. It comes with multiple layouts, slider, 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, search optimized, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info: Kathryn – WordPress Theme
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was created to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was specifically designed to help make your accounting website look professional 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 details section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info: Accounting WordPress Theme WordPress Premium Theme
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a corporate theme developed 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 for employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more details: WP Advocate Theme
Divi
(Divi)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional website using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include accordion, blog, code, divider, image, map, person, sidebar, social media follow, video, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all themes.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme website: Divi Theme For WordPress
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
The Corporation Theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to create good-looking corporate websites.
It has a 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 comes with 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 over 80 sleek business themes.
For more information, go here: The Corporation – WordPress Theme
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was built to help finance industry professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investing advice or tax advice. The theme 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.
Go here for more information: Adviser – WordPress Theme
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and those that offer tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way and help build your business reputation. It provides different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info: Tax Help – WordPress Theme
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)
Finance Business was developed for businesses that provide financial services such as tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content. It also includes the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and lots more.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, visit the theme site: Finance Business Theme
We hope that you have found this guide on how to improve your accounting or financial services website with WordPress plugins and themes helpful.
Get Notified When New Tutorials Are Published – Subscribe To Our Site!
***
Recommended WordPress Plugins And Themes:
Disclaimer: This site is not associated with WordPress, Automattic, or any of the WordPress-related products mentioned or reviewed on this website. We may receive a financial benefit or affiliate commission from sales of any products mentioned on this website. All images remain the copyright of their respective owners and have been used only for illustrative or training purposes.
***
Have you found this article useful? Feel free to use the share buttons below and share this post with other WordPress users.
Like It? Share It:
