Grow Your Accounting Business Online With WordPress – 2

In Part 1 of this article on ways to grow your accounting business online, we covered the following areas:

• Challenges Accounting Professionals Face Online
• Opportunities For The Accounting Profession In The Online Economy
• Your Web Pages
• Improving The Content On Your Site

In this section, we will continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:

• Tips For Improving Web Traffic Using WordPress
• Generate Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
• Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With Plugins & Themes

For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:

• Using WordPress Plugins Enhance Your Website’s Capability
• A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding Themes

Grow Your Accounting Website – Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins

Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section, we explore WordPress plugins & themes for improving search engine optimization, increasing user engagement and traffic generation.

Optimize Your Site For Search Engines

There are so many ways WordPress can help to improve your accounting website’s SEO:

• URLs – configure the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
• Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
• Post Categories – Create categories for your posts and products.
• Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that will show to search engine users.
• Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
• Internal Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
• Pinging – Set up your site to automatically notify other sites and directories the moment a new post is published on your site.

WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Drive More Traffic

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, there are quite a number of plugins for WordPress that improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.

For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your site’s search engine optimization:

• All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
• Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
• 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 ways to improve your accounting site’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more powerful plugins that can help:

• BuddyPress – This free plugin lets you set up your own social networking community on your site.
• bbPress – Set up your own online community forum on your site.
• E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
• Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your site.
• Floating Social – Add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your website.

(You can easily add social features to your website using free or inexpensive plugins)

Generate More Leads & Enquiries

Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting business.

Adding An Email Newsletter

Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. Adding email newsletters] provides many benefits including:

• Drives targeted traffic to your site
• Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
• Keeps readers updated
• Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
• Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
• Increases user interaction
• Provides you with another way for readers to share your content

A proven strategy for getting visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and give users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could 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 readers to get in touch with you. Contact forms also allow visitors to raise concerns, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.

A contact form provides a number of benefits including:

• Reducing spam
• Automated response
• Giving you control over what is 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 site
• More convenient for visitors

One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)

Contact Form 7 lets you add multiple contact forms to your posts and pages, customize the forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.

International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam filtering is supported.

Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospective customers can select which department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.

Map Integration

Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you.

Adding maps (e.g. Google Maps) to your site also provides users with a number of benefits, such as:

• They increase local SEO
• Visitors can find you more easily and clients can plan their trips better
• Shows location of events

(Adding a map to your site helps your visitors and customers find you)

Below are just some plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your WordPress site:

• Google Maps
• Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
• WP Google Maps
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin

Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Traffic With WordPress Plugins

Financial Plugins For WordPress

WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting website that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators)

This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin supports internationalization

Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:

• Mortgage
• Loans
• Tax
• Credit
• And many more

For more details, go here}:

• Calculators Pro – WordPress Plugin

Show Stock Quotes

(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)

This plugin lets you add a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many portfolios as you like.

(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)

For more details, go here}:

• Show Stock Quotes Plugin

Custom Stock Ticker

(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin)

With this plugin you can add a custom stock ticker to any page, post, or sidebar using shortcodes.

Custom Stock ticker offers a number of customizable features. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize these yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.

Appearance customization features include colours, size, symbols, etc.

For more details, go here}:

• Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin

Finance Calculator

(Finance Calculator WP Plugin)

This free plugin allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. This is a great tool for calculating vehicle loans, property loans, or other large loans.

(Finance Calculator WP Plugin – Loan Calculator)

The plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to the email address you specify.

It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create forms that can be placed in any page or post.

For more details, go here}:

• Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress

WP-Invoice

(WP-Invoice)

WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.

This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices. It also allows you to set up recurring billing. WP-Invoice 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 your 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, 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, viewing reports (collected vs uncollected invoices, valuable clients and top grossing line items), and more..

For more details, go here}:

• WP-Invoice Plugin For WordPress

All In One Business Management Application

(All In One Business Management Application)

This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticket management system, client relationship management and many additional features.

(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)

All In One Business Management Application supports multiple languages, is fully customizable and provides additional tools such as document management, to do app, and more.

For more details, go here}:

• All In One Business Management Application

iBilling – Accounting And Billing Software

(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software)

iBilling is a scalable business software that lets you manage customers and invoices, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.

(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoicing)

It allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.

For more details, go here}:

• iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin

Accounting And Financial Services Themes For WordPress

To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a list of some of the best accountancy themes available. 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 a turn-key theme developed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and a whole lot more.

You can easily expand this theme by installing premium add-ons.

For more information, go here:

• Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress

Accountancy

(Accountancy Theme)

This premium theme for WordPress comes with a variety of styles and layouts to give your accounting website a professional look and feel.

This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and loads fast. It 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.

Visit the theme site to learn more about this theme:

• Accountancy Theme For WordPress

Accounting

(Accounting)

This premium theme for WordPress includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.

For more information, go here:

• Accounting Theme

Kathryn

(Kathryn Theme)

This premium theme for WordPress was designed specifically for accountants. The theme allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive. Although it could easily suit any profession, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress responsive slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.

For more details, go here:

• Kathryn – WordPress Theme

Accounting WordPress Theme

(Accounting WordPress Theme – WordPress Theme)

This premium theme for WordPress was designed with the idea of 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 site look professional while not 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.

More info:

• Accounting WordPress Theme

WP Advocate

(WP Advocate Theme For WordPress)

WP Advocate 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 also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. It’s clean and loads fast.

Go here for more information:

• WP Advocate – WordPress Theme

Divi

(Divi Theme For WordPress)

This premium theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using the page builder or pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.

Divi’s page builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily change the structure of their page without editing code.

(Divi WP Theme – Page Builder)

It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include bar counter, call to action, circle counter, divider, image, number counter, portfolio, sidebar, testimonial, video, fullwidth image, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 stunning themes.

More information:

• Divi Theme

The Corporation

(The Corporation Theme)

This premium WordPress theme from Elegant Themes was developed specifically to create great-looking corporate websites.

The Corporation has a page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider, blog design, 6 different different color schemes, multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Elegant Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 sleek business themes.

For more details about using this WordPress theme, visit the theme website:

• The Corporation Theme

Adviser

(Adviser Theme)

This premium theme was specifically designed to help finance professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services like investing or tax advice. Adviser 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.

More information:

• Adviser Theme

Tax Help

(Tax Help WordPress Theme)

Tax Help WordPress Theme was specifically developed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those offering tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to show your services professionally to help grow your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.

More info:

• Tax Help WordPress Theme

Finance Business

(Finance Business Theme For WordPress)

This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed for organizations that provide any type of financial service such as tax help, consulting, corporate, finance, insurance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, 2 premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and lots more.

More information:

• Finance Business 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, this guide has helped you learn WordPress plugins & themes for improving SEO, better user engagement and generating more visitors to your accounting site.

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