In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
- Online Opportunities For Accounting Professionals
- Ways To Improve Your Website Pages
- Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Traffic Using WordPress
- Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
- Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic With WordPress Plugins And Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Ways Of Improving Traffic With WordPress
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
There are loads of ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want your articles to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that will display to search engine users.
- Images – title images with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for better indexing of pages
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins For Improving SEO, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are a number of WordPress plugins that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your site.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages for indexing by search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your SEO)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Run your own online social community on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin helps you set up a forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add social sharing features on your pages and posts.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their website with free or inexpensive plugins)
How To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now take a look at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides several benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps readers from forgetting about you
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases user interaction
- Provides an additional way for your content to be shared online with others
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and give them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients to get in touch. Contact forms also let users report concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request a quote, give suggestions and more.
A contact form provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you add and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize your forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option you may want to consider is adding sections to your contact form so visitors can choose the topic they are contacting you about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Map Integration
Adding maps helps your visitors and customers find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- They help to improve local SEO
- Visitors can easily find you
- Displays location of events
(Maps help 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 site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve SEO, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic With WordPress Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services Plugins For WordPress
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for users. 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 posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Leases
- Equity
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you get a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WP Plugin)
This free plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin provides several customizable features. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free plugin lets users calculate indicative repayments online. This is a great tool for car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
It will display 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}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice Plugin)
WP-Invoice is ideal for WordPress site owners with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It even allows you to set up recurring billing. It can be expanded through both free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quote creation, 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 others.
WP-Invoice features include adding custom payments and charges, inserting pre-defined line items and discounts, viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating notification e-mail templates, accessing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 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)
This complete business management system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and ticketing system, client relationship management and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools such as 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 and communicate with clients, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Client Invoice)
iBilling Accounting and Billing Software allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting And Financial Services
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. With these themes you can own a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can expand Accounting Pro through premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This one comes in a variety of built-in styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and fast loading. It provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in your purchase.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your website any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
For more details, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is a premium WordPress child theme for the Genesis Framework built specifically for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, various colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme was developed to enhance professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help make your accounting business 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme specifically designed 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 adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create a professional website using its page builder or beautiful 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 edit the structure of their pages without touching code.
(Divi WP Theme – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is responsive and fully customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 themes.
More information:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
This one was developed specifically to make corporate websites look good.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More information:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax help. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically designed for financial companies, tax and financial advisors, and those that provide tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally 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.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed for firms that provide any type of financial service such as consulting, tax help, insurance, corporate, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot 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, you have found this guide on ways of improving your accounting website using WordPress helpful.
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