In Part One of this step-by-step guide on ways to build your accounting business online, we covered the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Online Economy
- Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving The Content On Your Site
In this section, we will continue exploring more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic With WordPress
- Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Business Generation Using Plugins & Themes
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
- Using WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Website’s Features
- A Basic Guide To Understanding Themes
Grow Your Accounting Website – Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Web traffic is vital to your business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are loads of ways WordPress can help to improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your article pages to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Categories – Add search engine-friendly categories for your posts and products.
- Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show to search engine users.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your content images for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links
- Post Notification – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories whenever a new post is published on your site.
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation With Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress developer community makes available various plugins that will improve your website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more visitors to your website.
For example, here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your site’s search engine optimization)
Other ways to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing. Here are some more plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – This free plugin allows you to run your own social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a discussion forum on your website.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard, without third-party subscriptions.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your website or blog.
- Floating Social – Easily add powerful social sharing features on your website or blog.
(You can add social features to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate New Leads & Enquiries
Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries.
Add A Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. Adding a newsletter provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving user interaction
- Provides another way for subscribers to share your content
An effective strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with information of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This could be a special report, tips for handling finances, access to tax calculators, coupons, membership access to subscriber-only content, contests, etc.
Provide A Contact Form
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can raise problems, contact specific departments, ask for a quote, give suggestions and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- They can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Convenient for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and configure and lets you create multiple contact forms to your website, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
Supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Another option to consider is to add sections to your contact form so prospects can choose the topic they are contacting your company about. This ensures that visitors’ requests reach the right person.
Provide Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are a very useful tool for several reasons:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Customers can better plan their meeting and appointments
- Displays location of events
(A map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display Google maps on your WordPress site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Traffic Using WordPress Plugins
Accounting And Financial Services – WordPress Plugins
WordPress lets you add a number of plugins to your accounting or financial services site that will immediately make available a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few for:
- 401k
- Payments
- CD
- Equity
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can display as many widgets as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker – WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can place a custom stock ticker on any sidebar, post or page using shortcodes.
This plugin includes a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match your website. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Appearance customization features include width, height, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful tool for calculating car loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send 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 Plugin)
WP-Invoice lets WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin 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 payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, add pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create email notification templates, display 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 For WordPress)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with knowledgebase and ticketing management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoice)
The plugin supports different 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 client data and invoices, track your company’s net worth and cash flow, send single-click payment reminders and payment confirmations, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software WordPress Plugin – Invoicing)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes
To get the best features and professional look for your website, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best accounting themes available. These themes allow you to have a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This premium WordPress theme is an inexpensive turn-key theme for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s a responsive theme with 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, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
You can customize this theme using premium add-ons.
To learn more about using this WordPress theme, visit this site:
Accountancy
(Accountancy – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme comes with a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting site a professional look and feel.
This fully responsive theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and fast loading. Accountancy provides the features you need without bloating your theme. The price includes free updates and one year of support.
To learn more about this theme, visit this website:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This one includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. It also provides unlimited sidebars and custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and is fast to load.
To learn more about using this theme, go here:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built 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, many color choices, is easy to use, inexpensive, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although it can easily fit any profession you like, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
For more details about using this theme, visit the theme site:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was developed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was designed specifically to help make your accounting website look professional 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 accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate)
This is a corporate theme specifically designed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
More information:
Divi
(Divi)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection of WordPress themes. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout to your heart’s content.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without editing a single line of code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes accordion, blog, code, divider, gallery, number counter, person, pricing table, social media follow, text, fullwidth header, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to all beautifully-designed themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This theme from Elegant Themes was built specifically to make corporate sites look great.
It has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent slider. It also has a blog design and features that toggle on and off. It comes with 6 different color schemes. It also has multiple page templates that include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes full access to 80+ sleek business themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was specifically developed to help businesses in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s perfect for businesses that provide services such as investment advice or tax advice. Adviser 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.
Visit the theme site to learn more about using this theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those that offer tax services. The theme is designed to show your services professionally and help establish your business reputation. It comes with 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 theme was built for organizations that provide any type of financial service including consulting, tax help, finance, corporate, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animated elements, and a whole lot more.
For more details, go here:
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 ways of improving SEO, improve user engagement and increase web traffic generation with plugins and themes.
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