In Part 1 of this guide on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided in-depth tips and suggestions on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For Accountants
- Opportunities For Accounting Businesses In The Web Economy
- Improve Your Website Pages
- Improve Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting business online. Areas covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Traffic
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress-Based Applications
- WordPress Plugins & Themes For Improving SEO, Creating Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
Tips For Accountants – How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins And Themes
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. In this section, you will learn WordPress plugins for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and traffic generation.
Optimize Your Site For SEO With WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps improve SEO:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the post.
- Tags – Specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for improved search results.
- Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily create internal links for better page indexing
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your site.
WordPress Plugins That Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available many plugins that improve SEO, increase user engagement and drive more web traffic to your site.
For example, you can use the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- Yoast SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress sitemap plugin
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization)
Other WordPress tools you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing features. Here are a few more fantastic plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress plugin to set up and manage your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – This free plugin allows you to run a community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website or blog.
- Monarch – Use this WordPress plugin to add social sharing features and buttons to your posts and pages.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using WordPress plugins)
How To Generate Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate new leads and enquiries online.
Providing An Email Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to build a list of subscribers. Adding an email newsletter provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Drives targeted traffic to your website
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful information and advice
- Provides a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special services or products to a select audience
- Provides new opportunities for improving engaging with users
- Provides another way for your content to be shared with other prospective clients
A proven way to get visitors to become subscribers is to provide users with high value content and offer them free gifts in exchange for their details. This could be a useful report, checklists for handling finances, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to courses, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Readers can provide feedback, ask questions to specific departments, request quotes, send suggestions and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits and advantages, like:
- Reducing spam
- Set up automated responses
- Giving you control over what is sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for users
A very popular contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 – WordPress Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that allows you to insert and manage multiple contact forms into any page or post, customize the form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Another option you may want to consider is to segment your contact form so visitors can select the topic they want to discuss. This ensures that visitors get the comment to the right person.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps, such as Google Maps, into your WordPress site also provides many benefits, such as:
- A map helps to increase local SEO
- Visitors can find your office more easily and helps customers can plan their trips better
- Displays location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and customers 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 SEO, Improve User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation Using Plugins & Themes
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 practical tools for users. Here are some of these plugins:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of 400+ calculators that you can display on your website. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Loans
- Leases
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin gives you a widget that shows up to 20 different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many widgets as you want.
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin lets you add custom stock tickers to any sidebar, post or page with shortcodes.
This plugin includes a number of customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in themes or customize it yourself. It’s easy to customize it so it matches your site. You can also add custom stocks to specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, background color, scrolling speed, opacity, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress)
This free plugin lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on car loans, property, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator – WordPress Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The Finance Calculator 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 a form that can be placed in any page or post.
For more details, go here}:
WP-Invoice
(WP-Invoice)
WP-Invoice lets you send itemized invoices to clients.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send clients itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with free and premium add-ons, like business location, electronic signature, PDF creation, quoting, single-page checkout forms, and more.
The plugin ties into your WordPress user management database to keep track of clients and their information, and integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several others.
WP-Invoice lets you add custom payments and charges, insert pre-defined line items and discounts, view invoice status and progression, easily filter and find invoices, show invoice receipts and invoice history, create e-mail notification templates, access 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 is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with ticket management system, CRM and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports multiple 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)
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 – Invoice)
iBilling allows you to get paid faster by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Themes - Accounting Services
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, we recommend choosing a theme specifically suited for accounting. Here is a look at some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. These themes allow you to own a professional accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is an inexpensive turn-key theme developed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has 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 customize this theme through premium add-ons.
To learn more about this theme, visit the theme site:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme)
This premium theme offers a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
This fully responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search engine optimized, and loads fast. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme. Free updates and one year of support is included with the price.
Go here for more info:
Accounting
(Accounting)
This premium theme includes a drag-and-drop builder that allows you to design your website any way you want. It also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom administration panel, four color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. It looks clean and modern and loads fast.
More information:
Kathryn
(Kathryn WordPress Theme)
Kathryn is built specifically for accounting services. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, a variety of color options, is easy to use, search engine friendly, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme could easily suit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy WordPress slider plugin and must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Visit the theme website to learn more this WordPress theme:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was built 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 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 fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as CSV), testimonials, and a blog.
For more details about using this WordPress theme, go here:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme developed for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type adding staff profiles and can also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is a clean and fast-loading theme.
More information:
Divi
(Divi WP Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire collection. Divi lets you create a professional site using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
The builder transforms web elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and redesign the structure of their web pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include accordion, call to action, circle counter, divider, filterable portfolio, login, person, pricing table, testimonial, video slider, fullwidth header, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth post title, and more.. Divi is mobile-friendly and fully customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation WP Theme)
The Corporation from Elegant Themes was built specifically to make corporate websites look great.
It has a 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 color schemes. It also has 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 access to 80+ professional themes.
More info:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme For WordPress)
The Adviser WordPress Theme was designed specifically to help finance professionals build trust through clean design. It’s perfect for those that provide services like investment advice or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and the drag-and-drop visual composer..
For more information, go here:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and those offering tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way and help build your professional 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.
For more details, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business)
Finance Business was designed specifically for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around 100 shortcodes that let you add charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management, animations, and lots more.
For more details about this WordPress theme, visit the theme site:
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
We hope that you have found this article on how to improve your accounting or financial services business online using WordPress helpful.
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