In Part 1 of this guide on ways to improve your accounting business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following areas:
- Challenges Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Professional Accountants
- Essential Web Pages
- Ways To Improve The Content On Your Site
In this section, we continue looking at more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Topics covered below include:
- Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
- Tips For Generating New Leads & Enquiries
- How To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Drive More Web Traffic Using WordPress Plugins & Themes
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Grow Your Accounting Website – WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization, Better User Engagement And Web Traffic Generation
Your web traffic is an important part of your online business growth. This section will help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimize Your Site For SEO Using WordPress
There are so many ways that WordPress helps optimize your website for search engines:
- URLs – Set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – Choose the keywords that you want your posts to be indexed for in the search engines.
- Post Categories – Add categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Post Excerpts – Create an excerpt that will appear in search results.
- Images – add search-optimized titles to your images for improved search results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links
- Pinging – WordPress can be configured to automatically notify (ping) other search directories whenever a new post is published on your website.
WordPress Plugins For Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Increasing User Engagement And Traffic Generation
In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WP community makes available a number of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your website.
Here are some plugins you can use to improve your SEO:
- All in One SEO – WordPress SEO plugin
- Google XML Sitemaps – WordPress XML sitemap plugin (lists all of your pages and posts for search engines)
- WP Tree – WordPress site map plugin (for visitors)
(A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your SEO)
Other ways to improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are a few more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below are also free):
- BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up your own social community on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, and more.
- bbPress – Set up your own online community forum on your site.
- E-Newsletter – Use this plugin to send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – Disqus lets you power discussions and helps to increase engagement on your website.
- Social Media Feather – Add powerful social sharing features and buttons to your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Generating Leads & Enquiries
Let’s take a look now at how to improve your sales and generate new leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing an email newsletter is a great way to build a subscriber list. It provides many benefits and advantages including:
- Drives targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to provide special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides additional ways for your content to be shared around with others
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts in exchange for their details. This can be a handy guide, checklists for handling tax, access to financial calculators, discount coupons, membership access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
A contact form provides an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch with you. A contact form also lets visitors send feedback, ask questions to specific departments, ask for a quote, and more.
A contact form provides a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what is sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Different forms can be added to any post or page
- Improves the professional look of your site
- More convenient for site visitors
One of the most popular contact form plugins for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WP Plugin)
Contact form 7 is a free plugin that lets you create multiple contact forms on your posts and pages, customize your forms and the mail contents, add fields, and more.
The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submissions, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the aspect of your business they are contacting your company about. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Provide A Map
Maps help your visitors and customers find you.
Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:
- A map increases local SEO
- Allows customers to better plan their meeting and appointments
- Display location of events
(Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you)
Below are just some popular plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your site:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Visitors To Your Accounting Or Financial Services Site Using WordPress Plugins
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of these:
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 pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. It also supports internationalization
Note: Most of the calculators aren’t focused on accounting, but there are a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Debit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays up to 20 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 WordPress Plugin)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar using shortcodes.
The plugin comes with several customizable features. Choose from 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 individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing height, width, background color, opacity, scrolling speed, number of stocks displayed at one time, font size, font family, text color, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator WordPress Plugin)
This free plugin allows your users to calculate indicative repayments online. This is a useful financial tool for calculating automotive loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
This plugin also contains an application form that sends a notification message to a specified email address.
Other features of this plugin include showing 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 is ideal for WordPress business users with clients to bill.
WP-Invoice lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand plugin functionality with 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 clients and their information, and integrates with payment processors like PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and several 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, easily filter and find invoices, see invoice receipts and invoice history, create notification email templates, view 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 WordPress Plugin)
This complete business management solution includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, helpdesk with support ticket management system, client relationship management and lots more.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
The plugin supports different 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 client data and invoices, track your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoicing)
It lets you get paid faster online by integrating with several online payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Accounting And Financial Services Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, we recommend choosing 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-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro)
This is a turn-key theme 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 (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
Accounting Pro can be customized with premium add-ons.
More information:
Accountancy
(Accountancy)
Accountancy comes with a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This responsive (mobile-friendly) theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial, it’s lightweight, SEO friendly, and loads fast. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Free updates and 1 year of support is included in the cost of purchasing.
Go here to learn more about using this theme:
Accounting
(Accounting – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress 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 header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, a custom slider, three different blog types, and is fully responsive (mobile-friendly). Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast loading theme.
Visit this website for more details about using this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme)
This one is designed specifically for accounting businesses. Kathryn allows you to use WordPress as a true content management system and provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, various colors, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive (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 must be purchased separately from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more info:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This one was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. It features authoritative colors and elements specifically designed to help give your accounting site a professional look. It’s a turn-key installation but you can still modify it if you want. It’s responsive and includes pages for your services, contact section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
More info:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
This is a free corporate theme built specifically for professionals such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. It also includes a custom post type adding employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This theme is the most flexible theme in Elegant Themes‘ collection. Divi lets you create any style of professional website you want using its page builder or beautiful pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing you to understand and edit the structure of their pages without editing code.
(Divi – WordPress Theme – Page Builder)
It comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. These include audio player, blurb, circle counter, countdown timer, filterable portfolio, number counter, portfolio, sidebar, social media follow, toggle, fullwidth header, fullwidth portfolio, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is responsive and completely customizable. Themes start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 stunning themes.
More info:
The Corporation
(The Corporation)
This one was specifically designed to create great-looking corporate sites.
This theme has a sleek page-based home page design with a prominent slider, blog design, 6 unique color schemes, multiple page templates which 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+ beautifully-designed themes.
Go here for more information:
Adviser
(Adviser – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was built specifically to help finance industry professionals build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for businesses that provide services such as investing or tax help. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications, a built-in lease calculator, multiple shortcodes and widgets, and a drag-and-drop visual composer..
More info:
Tax Help
(Tax Help)
This one was designed specifically for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms providing tax services. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services professionally and help grow your business reputation. It has different blog styles, uses the drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and many custom shortcodes.
For more information about this theme, visit the theme website:
Finance Business
(Finance Business WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress was designed for firms that provide any type of financial service including tax help, consulting, insurance, finance, corporate, loans, accounting, and more. The theme includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin. It also has around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content. It also includes a custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page settings, color management features, animations, and a whole lot more.
To learn more about using this theme, 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, you have found this guide on ways to improve SEO, increase user engagement and generate more traffic with plugins & themes helpful.
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