In Part 1 of this article on ways to build your accounting business online, we covered the following areas:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Website
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered include:
- Improve Traffic
- How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- WP Plugins – Improve Your Blog’s Features And Functionality
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes
Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins that can help improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more visitors to your accounting or financial services website.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines (SEO)
There are lots of ways that WordPress helps improve your accounting website’s SEO:
- SEO-Friendly – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed by in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add SEO-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will show in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- 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 (ping) other search directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Visitors With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, there are various plugins for WordPress that improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)
Other ways to improve your site’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins described below are also free):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up your own community forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and increases engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – This WordPress plugin lets you add powerful social sharing features and buttons on your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social features to your website using WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating Leads & Enquiries
This section covers how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your accounting business.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. It provides several benefits, like:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates that can save businesses time and money
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases engagement with users
- Provides you with another way for subscribers to share your content
One of the things you can do to get visitors to subscribe to your newsletter is to provide users with high value content and offer them a free gift in exchange for their personal details. This could be an exclusive guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms make it easy and simple for prospective customers to get in touch with you. Visitors can report issues, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Reduces spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your website
- More convenient for users
A popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and allows you to insert multiple contact forms, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective clients can select which topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Adding Maps
Maps help your visitors and clients find you.
Adding maps, such as Google Maps to your site also provides a number of benefits, such as:
- Maps increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Display location of events
(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)
Below are just some popular 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, Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
Accounting Plugins For WordPress
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your site to immediately add a range of functional tools for visitors. Here are just some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin For WordPress)
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 quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Loans
- CD
- Equity
- And many more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker)
This plugin lets you place a custom stock ticker on any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.
This plugin comes with loads of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scrolling speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed at one time, typeface, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on vehicle loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculator)
The plugin also contains an application form that sends a message to the email address you specify.
Other features of this plugin include displaying 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 – WordPress Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices. It also 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, 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 many others.
Plugin 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, 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 Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with knowledgebase and support ticket system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Invoicing)
All In One Business Management Application supports international languages, is fully customizable and provides powerful tools like document management, to do app, 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 and communicate with clients, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WP Plugin – Client Invoice)
It lets you get paid faster by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting businesses. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This premium WordPress theme is a turn-key theme for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, custom menu features, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, performs auto resizing for images, and a whole lot more.
You can easily expand Accounting Pro with premium add-ons.
For more details, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium WordPress theme has a variety of built-in styles and layouts to 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 engine optimized, and fast loading. Accountancy Theme provides the features your business needs without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included in your purchase.
More info:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme For WordPress)
This theme 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 header types, a custom admin panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
More info:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was designed specifically for accounting businesses. It allows you to use WordPress as a true CMS and offers multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, many color choices, is easy to use, search engine friendly, and is responsive. 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 responsive slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
More info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)
This one was developed to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., is designed specifically to help give your accounting business site a professional look 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 CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more information about this WordPress theme:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)
This is a free corporate theme built specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type adding employee profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s a clean-looking and fast-loading theme.
Go here for more details:
Divi
(Divi Theme For WordPress)
This is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a 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 easily edit the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as multiple layouts, a slider, you can place pricing tables, testimonials, call-to-action, and lots more. It is responsive and completely customizable. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
Go here for more info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme For WordPress)
The Corporation was designed specifically to make corporate sites look good.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider, blog design, six 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+ professional themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser)
This premium theme was specifically designed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for those that provide services such as investments or tax help. The theme 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..
Visit the theme website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme For WordPress)
This theme was designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your professional 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.
More information:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
Finance Business was specifically designed for firms that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, finance, insurance, corporate, 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 a custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and lots more.
Go here for 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 guide has helped you learn ways to improve your website with WordPress.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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