In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Web Economy
- Your Web Pages
- How To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways Of Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Tools
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Improve Search Engine Optimization, Create Better User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
Your web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. This section explores ways to improve your business online with WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For Search Engines
There are many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
- Post Excerpts – Create the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other search directories the moment a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available various plugins that will improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your site.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- Page-List – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO)
Other things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are some plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social network on WordPress.
- bbPress – Set up your own online community forum on your WordPress website.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Social Media Feather – This plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing buttons to your website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generate New Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
In this section we discuss ways to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Adding An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Increases interaction
- Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others
An effective strategy for enticing your visitors to become subscribers is to provide high value information and give users a free gift in exchange for their details. This can be a time-saving guide, checklists for handling tax, access to tax calculators, discount coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to contact you. Users can report concerns, contact specific departments, ask for quotes, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
This free contact form plugin is easy to install and configure and lets you create and manage multiple contact forms, customize your form and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Another option you may want to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select the aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Adding A Map
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
A map is a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to improve local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits or appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins for WordPress include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Generate More Visitors With Plugins
WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website to immediately add a range of functional 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. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- Interest rate
- Payments
- Leases
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin installs a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)
This plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker includes a number of customizable features. Choose from built-in themes or customize it yourself to match your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, scroll speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating vehicle loans, real estate loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculator)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a notification message to the email address you specify.
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 you send itemized invoices to clients.
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 that let you manage business, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoices, create quotes, create 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and others.
The plugin gives you the ability to add custom payments and charges, create pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, access reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, 10 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 system includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticketing system, CRM and many added features.
(All In One Business Management Application – Client Invoice)
All In One Business Management Application supports different languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, notice board, 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, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – Client Invoice)
iBilling lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes For Accounting
To benefit the most from using WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Below is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
Accounting Pro is a turn-key theme created for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has 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.
You can customize Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
Accountancy Theme offers a variety of built-in styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, search engine optimized, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
Go here for more details:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
This theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, a custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). It is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
Kathryn is a premium child theme for the Genesis Framework created specifically for accounting services. It has multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, a variety of colors, is easy to use, search engine friendly, and is mobile-friendly. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more details about this theme, go here:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was created with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements designed specifically to give your accounting website a professional look without 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 section, and a blog.
For more information, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
This is a free corporate theme designed 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. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean and fast-loading theme.
More info:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. You can create any kind of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their web pages without editing any code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include bar counter, blog, code, countdown timer, image, login, post title, sidebar, tabs, video, fullwidth header, fullwidth menu, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This theme was created specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a nice slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ themes.
Go here for more info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
The Adviser Theme was built to help finance professionals build trust with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing advice or tax advice. The Adviser theme includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes widgets and multiple shortcodes, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
Tax Help Theme was specifically designed for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and businesses that offer tax services. Tax Help is designed to show your services in a professional way to help establish your business reputation. It comes with a range of blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
Visit this website to learn more about using this theme:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This theme was designed for organizations that provide financial services such as consulting, tax help, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. This theme 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, animations, and a whole lot more.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
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 WordPress plugins that can help improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic useful.
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