In Part One of this article on ways to build your accounting business online, we provided in-depth information on the following topics:
- Online Challenges For The Accounting & Financial Services Profession
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Digital Economy
- Ways To Improve Your Web Pages
- Tips For Improving Your Content
In this section, we explore more ways to grow your accounting services business online. Areas covered below include:
- Improve Traffic
- Generating Leads & Enquiries
- WordPress Plugins And Themes That Can Help Improve Search Engine Optimization, Improve User Engagement And Generate More Web Traffic
To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see these articles:
Grow Your Accounting Website – How To Improve Your Business Online Using WordPress
Your web traffic is vital to your online business growth. This section discusses WordPress plugins and themes for improving search engine optimization, better user engagement and generating more visitors.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines
There are so many ways WordPress can help to optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to create search engine-optimized web addresses for your articles and posts.
- Post Tags – Choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your articles for.
- Post Categories – Create search engine-friendly categories for archiving and organizing your content.
- Excerpts – Set the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
- Images – title images with keywords for improved search engine results.
- Internal Content Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that lets you easily link your content to other posts
- Post Notification – Set up your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories as soon as a new post is published on your website.
Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WP development community makes available dozens of plugins that will improve your accounting or financial services website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your business.
For example, 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 (for search engines)
- 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 things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more traffic to your business are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some useful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – Set up your own online social community on WordPress.
- bbPress – Use bbPress to set up your own forum on your WordPress site.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WP dashboard.
- Disqus – This plugin lets you power discussions and increases user engagement on your website.
- Monarch – This plugin lets you add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online to your site.
(You can easily add social sharing features to your site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
Tips For Generating More Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress
Let’s take a look now at ways to improve your sales and generate leads and enquiries for your accounting or financial services business.
Add A Newsletter
Adding an email newsletter is a great way to grow and retain your readership. It provides a number of benefits, like:
- Sends targeted traffic to your site
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
- Allows you to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Provides regular opportunities for increasing user interaction
- Provides you with other ways for your content to be shared online with others
A proven strategy for attracting subscribers is to provide users with content of high value and offer them free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This can be an exclusive guide, tips for handling tax, access to tax calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Contact Forms
Contact forms provide an easy and simple way for readers to get in touch. Visitors can report problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.
Contact forms provide a number of benefits including:
- Reducing spam
- Automated response
- Gives you control over what gets sent to you
- Allows you to keep your email address private
- Contact forms can be added to any page or post
- Improves the professional look of your website
- Is convenient for visitors
A very popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add and manage multiple contact forms, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is supported.
Something to consider is adding sections to your contact form so prospects can select the department they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the right person.
Maps
Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.
Inserting maps (e.g. Google Maps), into your website also provides users with many benefits, such as:
- They help to increase local SEO
- Allows clients to better plan their visits and appointments
- Show location of events
(Adding a map helps your visitors and clients find you)
Here are just some of the more plugins that let you embed, customize and display maps on your website:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Drive More Visitors To Your Website With WordPress Plugins
WordPress Accounting Plugins
WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your accounting site that will immediately make available a range of practical tools for site visitors. Here are just some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators Plugin)
This plugin provides a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed them into your pages, posts, or sidebars using shortcodes. The plugin also supports internationalization
Note: Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are a few for:
- Interest rate
- Rate of return
- Tax
- Credit
- And lots more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin installs 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 place custom stock tickers on any page, post, or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker offers several customizable ticker. You can choose to use built-in skins or customize it yourself to match your site. You can also add custom stocks to individual categories.
Customize the appearance by changing width, height, scrolling speed, opacity, background color, number of stocks displayed simultaneously, font size, text color, font family, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator)
This free calculator lets your visitors calculate indicative repayments online. It’s great for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or other large loans.
(Finance Calculator Plugin – Loan Calculators)
The plugin also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
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 WordPress blog owners send itemized invoices to their clients.
This plugin lets you integrate billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand functionality with free and premium add-ons that let you manage locations, accept electronic signatures, create PDF invoice versions, provide quotes, create 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, 2Checkout, Interkassa, and several others.
You can add custom payments and charges, create 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, display 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 For WordPress)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with ticketing management system, client relationship management and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin For WordPress – Client Invoice)
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}:
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 customers, tracks your company’s cash flow and net worth, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software Plugin – Invoice)
It integrates with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
Financial Themes For WordPress
To benefit the most from using WordPress to grow your business online, it’s best to choose a theme specifically suited for accounting. Below is a list of some of the best WordPress themes available for accounting. With the themes below you can own a professional accounting website within minutes and save hundreds to thousands of dollars on the cost of website design.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro Theme For WordPress)
This is an inexpensive turn-key theme designed for accountants and accounting firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, has several page templates, custom menus, a content composer (which improves on the standard WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resized images, and a whole lot more.
You can expand this theme with premium add-ons.
For more information, go here:
Accountancy
(Accountancy WordPress Theme)
This theme comes in a variety of styles and layouts that helps make your accounting website look and feel professional.
This mobile-friendly theme includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, it’s lightweight, search optimized, and fast loading. It provides the flexibility you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
For more details, go here:
Accounting
(Accounting Theme)
Accounting Theme includes a drag-and-drop builder so you can design your site any way you want. The theme also has unlimited sidebars with custom widgets, four different types of headers, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, 3 blog types, and is mobile-friendly. Accountancy is a clean-looking, modern and fast-to-load theme.
Go here for more details:
Kathryn
(Kathryn Theme For WordPress)
Kathryn is a child theme for the Genesis Framework designed for accountants. The theme provides multiple layouts, slider, multiple sidebars, call to action boxes, many color options, is easy to use, search engine optimized, and is responsive (mobile-friendly). Although this theme can easily fit any profession you want it to, it builds a great looking accounting theme. It includes a license for the Soliloquy slider plugin and is a separate purchase from the Genesis Framework.
Go here for more details:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme – Theme For WordPress)
This theme was built to exude professionalism within the accounting industry. Every color, layout element, icon, menu item, page structure, call-to-action, etc., was specifically designed to 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 fully responsive and includes pages for your accounting services, contact form section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials section, and a blog.
More information:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate Theme)
WP Advocate is a free corporate theme designed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. Use the bundled images or upload your own. WP Advocate also includes a custom post type adding staff profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean-looking and loads fast.
Go here for more details about using this theme:
Divi
(Divi – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme is one of the most flexible themes in Elegant Themes‘ entire theme collection. Divi lets you create a unique, professional site using its page builder or beautiful and unique pre-made layouts. You can change your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily redesign the structure of their pages without touching code.
(Divi Theme For WordPress – Flexible Page Builder)
It has 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. Modules include bar counter, blog, contact form, email optin, filterable portfolio, map, person, sidebar, tabs, toggle, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. Divi is fully responsive and fully customizable. Theme prices start at $69 per year and includes access to 80+ professional themes.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was built specifically to create good-looking corporate sites.
The Corporation has a sleek and professional page-based home page design with a prominent, flashy slider. It also has a blog design. It has six different color schemes. It also has multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to over 80 beautifully-designed themes.
For more details, go here:
Adviser
(Adviser Theme)
This premium WordPress theme was specifically designed to help those in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services like investing or tax help. Adviser includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here to learn more about this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help – WordPress Theme)
This theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and finance advisors, and firms that provide tax services. The theme 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.
To learn more about this WordPress theme, go here:
Finance Business
(Finance Business Theme)
This premium theme was specifically built for organizations that provide financial services including consulting, tax help, corporate, insurance, finance, loans, accounting, and more. It includes a custom CMSMasters Visual Content Composer plugin, around one hundred shortcodes that includes charts and financial content, custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management features, animations, and lots more.
Go here for more information:
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 your accounting or financial services business online with WordPress plugins and themes.
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