In Part 1 of this guide on ways to grow your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Ways To Generate Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Tools
- Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors Using Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Adding New Features And Functionality To Your WordPress Blog With Plugins
- WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes
Ways To Improve Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. In this section, you will learn ways of improving your accounting website using WordPress themes and plugins.
Optimizing Your Website For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps improve your website’s SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your content posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you select the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – Create descriptions for your posts that search engines will show.
- Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts on your site
- Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can use the plugins below 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
(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 your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more useful WordPress plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own online social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – bbPress can be used to run your own community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – This WordPress plugin lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website or blog.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using free or inexpensive plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries online.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- 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 another way for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide them with valuable information and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Add A Contact Form
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for prospective clients to get in touch with you. A contact form also allows users to report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your site
- Is convenient for visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms on your site, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin also supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding a map to your website helps your visitors and customers find you.
Integrating maps, such as Google Maps, with your site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find you easily
- Displays location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular map plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
WordPress Plugins And Themes For Improving SEO, Better User Engagement And Traffic Generation
WordPress Financial Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website to immediately add a range of functional tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Mortgage
- Payments
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a custom stock ticker to any sidebar, page or post with shortcodes.
The plugin provides 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 add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing size, text, colours, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating vehicle loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to a specified email address.
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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
WP-Invoice 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 locations, accept electronic signatures from clients, 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 your clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and many others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, displaying 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 WordPress Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and support ticketing management system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools like document management, to do app, and more.
For more details, go here}:
iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin)
This is a scalable business software that lets you manage clients 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 Plugin – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best themes themes available for accounting firms. With the themes listed below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is an inexpensive 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, a custom menu feature, 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 through premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. It provides the features you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
For more information, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
For more information, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is designed for accounting services. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, various colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit 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 theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and layout elements specifically designed to give your accounting site 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, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers 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 for staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
More info:
Divi
(Divi WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you 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.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes bar counter, blurb, contact form, divider, image, login, post title, pricing table, tabs, text, fullwidth code, fullwidth map, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed specifically to create great-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 unique different 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 80+ stunning themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built to help finance industry professionals build trust through clean web design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investing or tax advice. The Adviser theme 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 information:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms providing tax assistance. The theme is designed to show your services in a professional way to help build your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Go here for more info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was developed specifically for businesses that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. This theme 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, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and lots more.
More info:
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 and themes for improving SEO, increasing user engagement and web traffic generation.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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