In Part 1 of this comprehensive article on ways to build your accounting business presence online, we provided in-depth information on the following areas:
- Challenges Professional Accountants Face Online
- Opportunities For Accountants In The Web Economy
- Your Website Pages
- How To Improve Your Content
In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your accounting business online. Topics covered include:
- Improve Traffic Using WordPress
- Generating More Leads & Enquiries With WordPress
- WordPress Plugins & Themes That Can Help Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Traffic Generation
For more information about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:
- Add New Features And Functionality To Your Web Site With Plugins
- A Newbie’s Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes
How To Improve Web Traffic
Web traffic is an integral part of your online business growth. In this section we explore ways to help you improve your web traffic using WordPress.
Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines Using WordPress
There are many ways that WordPress helps optimize your accounting or financial services website for search engines:
- Search Engine-Friendly URLs – WordPress lets you set the permalinks to use the title of the posts as the web address of your pages.
- Tags – WordPress lets you specify the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
- Post Categories – Add categories for your posts and products.
- Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose descriptions for your posts that will show in search results.
- Images – title images used in your content with keywords for better search results.
- Content Linking – WordPress has a built-in feature that lets you easily create internal links for faster indexing of your web pages
- Pinging – Configure your site to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing new content on your website.
WordPress Plugins That Can Help To Improve Search Engine Optimization, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation
As well as the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your accounting website’s SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your business.
For example, you can install the plugins below to improve your SEO:
- 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 things you can do to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more web traffic to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, commenting, and social sharing. Here are some powerful plugins that can help:
- BuddyPress – This plugin allows you to set up and run a social community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
- bbPress – This plugin allows you to run your own community forum on WordPress.
- E-Newsletter – This plugin lets you send professional email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress site.
- Disqus – Power discussions and helps to increase user engagement on your site.
- Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your site.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site with WordPress plugins)
Ways To Generate More Leads & Enquiries
In this section, we’ll look at how to improve sales and generate leads and enquiries for your business.
Add An Email Newsletter
Providing a newsletter is an excellent way to build a subscriber list. It provides a number of benefits and advantages including:
- Sends targeted traffic
- Keeps your business at the forefront of your reader’s minds
- Provides useful updates
- Provides a targeted marketing channel
- It’s a way to offer special products or services to a select audience
- Increases user engagement
- Provides you with other ways for readers to share your content
A proven strategy for attracting newsletter subscribers is to provide high value information and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their personal details. This could be a handy guide, tips for handling tax, access to financial calculators, coupons, access to videos, contests, etc.
Adding A Contact Form
A contact form makes it easy and simple for prospective clients 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 several benefits, like:
- Reduces spam
- Automated response
- Giving you control over what gets sent to you
- You can keep your email address private
- Can be added to any page or post
- Looks professional
- Convenience for site visitors
A popular contact form plugin for WordPress is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7
(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)
Contact Form 7 is easy to install and set up and lets you insert multiple contact forms on your pages and posts, customize your form and the email contents, add fields, and more.
International languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and spam filtering is also supported.
Something to consider is to segment your contact form so prospects can select the topic they want to discuss. This helps you get the comment to the right person.
Maps
A map helps your visitors and clients find you.
Maps are useful tools for several reasons:
- They increase local SEO
- Helps visitors find your office easily
- Show location of events
(Maps help your visitors and clients find you)
Popular Google Maps plugins include:
- Google Maps
- Advanced Google Maps Plugin for WordPress
- WP Google Maps
- Comprehensive Google Map Plugin
Improving SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using WordPress Plugins And Themes
Financial Plugins For WordPress
WordPress provides a number of plugins you can add to your site to immediately add a range of practical tools for users. Here are some of the plugins you can choose from:
Calculator Pro Calculators
(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)
This is a free collection of over 400 calculators that you can provide to users on your website and embed into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.
Most of them aren’t focused specifically on accounting, but there are quite a few you can use for:
- 401k
- Payments
- Tax
- Credit
- And more
For more details, go here}:
Show Stock Quotes
(Show Stock Quotes – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin lets you add a widget that displays a number of different stock quotes per portfolio. You can show as many portfolios as you like.
(Show Stock Quotes WP Plugin – Stock Portfolio)
For more details, go here}:
Custom Stock Ticker
(Custom Stock Ticker Plugin For WordPress)
With this plugin you can place custom stock tickers on any post, page or sidebar with shortcodes.
Custom Stock ticker provides a number of customizable ticker. Choose from built-in themes or customize these yourself to match the look and feel of your website. You can also create custom stocks for specific categories.
Customize the appearance by changing colours, size, symbols, etc.
For more details, go here}:
Finance Calculator
(Finance Calculator Plugin)
This free calculator allows your users to calculate indicative repayments. It’s great for calculating repayments on car loans, property loans, or any other large loan.
(Finance Calculator Plugin For WordPress – Loan Calculators)
Finance Calculator also contains an application form that will send a message to a specified email address.
It will show payment protection, calculate 12 to 60 months loans and create a form 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.
WP-Invoice integrates billing into WordPress. You can send out itemized invoices, set up recurring billing and expand 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 many others.
Plugin features include adding custom payments and charges, adding pre-defined line items and discounts, quickly viewing invoice status and progression, easily filtering and finding invoices, seeing invoice receipts and invoice history, creating email notification templates, displaying 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 WP Plugin)
This is a complete business management system that includes accounting management, invoicing, order management, help desk with support ticketing management system, CRM and many additional features.
(All In One Business Management Application Plugin – Invoice)
The plugin supports international 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, tracks your company’s net worth and cash flow, and lots more.
(iBilling – Accounting and Billing Software – WordPress Plugin – Invoice)
It allows you to get paid faster online by integrating with several payment gateways.
For more details, go here}:
WordPress Accounting Themes
To get the most benefit out of growing your business online with WordPress, it’s best to choose a theme specifically for accounting businesses. Here is a list of some of the best accounting themes available. With the themes listed below you can have a professional-looking accounting website within minutes.
Accounting Pro
(Accounting Pro – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress is a turn-key theme developed for accountants and accountancy firms. It’s responsive, has a drag-and-drop page-builder, offers several page templates, a custom menu feature, a content composer (gives you an improved WordPress editor), a sidebar manager, auto-resizing for images, and lots more.
You can easily expand this theme through premium add-ons.
More info:
Accountancy
(Accountancy Theme For WordPress)
This theme has a variety of styles and layouts to help give your accounting website a professional look and feel.
It includes a custom slider, a featured testimonial section, and more. It’s lightweight, SEO friendly, loads fast, and is responsive. Accountancy Theme provides what you need without bloating your theme with features you don’t need. Your purchase includes free updates and one year of support.
To learn more about about using this theme, visit this website:
Accounting
(Accounting WP Theme)
Accounting 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 header types, a custom admin panel, different color schemes, custom slider, three different blog types, and is responsive. Accountancy looks clean and modern and loads fast.
Visit this site to learn more this theme:
Kathryn
(Kathryn – WordPress Theme)
This one is a child theme for the Genesis Framework that’s developed specifically for accountants. The theme offers a slider, multiple layouts, multiple sidebars, widgetized home page, flexible rotator, call to action boxes, author boxes for single or multiple bloggers, many colors, is easy to use, inexpensive, search optimized, and is mobile-friendly. Although this theme can easily fit any profession you like, 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.
More information:
Accounting WordPress Theme
(Accounting WordPress Theme)
This theme was designed with the idea of professionalism within the accounting industry. It features an authoritative color scheme and layout elements specifically designed to help make your accounting business site 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 section with consultation requests (downloadable as a CSV file), testimonials, and a blog.
Go here for more details:
WP Advocate
(WP Advocate – WordPress Theme)
WP Advocate is a corporate theme developed specifically for professional service providers such as accountants and attorneys. You can use the theme’s bundled images or upload your own. It includes a custom post type for employee profiles. It will also integrate with BeSpoke profile templates. WP Advocate is clean and loads fast.
For more details, go here:
Divi
(Divi Theme)
This premium theme for WordPress 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 and unique pre-made layouts. You can modify your layout as much as you need.
Divi’s page builder transforms elements into visual building blocks, allowing anyone to understand and easily edit the structure of their page without touching any code.
(Divi – Flexible Page Builder)
Divi comes with 40 content modules that you can drag and drop anywhere you want. This includes modules such as bar counter, call to action, contact form, divider, filterable portfolio, number counter, post title, shop, tabs, video slider, fullwidth code, fullwidth menu, fullwidth slider, and more.. It is mobile-friendly and completely customizable. Prices start at $69 per year and includes access to all professional themes.
To learn more about this theme, go here:
The Corporation
(The Corporation – WordPress Theme)
This premium theme from Elegant Themes was specifically developed to create great-looking corporate websites.
This theme has a page-based home page design with a eye-catching slider. It also has a blog design. It comes with 6 color schemes. It also comes with multiple page templates which include contact pages, blog feeds, sitemaps, search page, gallery page, and more. Themes start at $69 per year and includes full access to over 80 themes.
Go here for more details about this WordPress theme:
Adviser
(Adviser WordPress Theme)
This premium theme was developed to help professionals in the financial industry to build trust online with a clean business design. It’s ideal for those that provide services such as investing or tax advice. It includes a recruitment page with hiring announcements and where to send applications. It also includes a built-in lease calculator. It includes multiple shortcodes and widgets, and includes the drag-and-drop visual composer.
Go here to learn more about using this WordPress theme:
Tax Help
(Tax Help Theme)
This premium theme was specifically built for financial organizations, tax and financial advisors, and firms that offer tax assistance. Tax Help is designed to showcase your services in a professional way to help establish your professional reputation. It comes with different blog styles, uses a drag-and-drop visual composer, includes a shortcode builder, the Revolution Slider, and additional custom shortcodes.
More info:
Finance Business
(Finance Business – WordPress Theme)
Finance Business was specifically developed for firms that provide financial services including tax help, consulting, finance, corporate, insurance, accounting, loans, and more. This 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 the custom drag-and-drop composer, two premium sliders, page options, color management, animations, and a 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 guide has helped you learn ways of improving your business online using WordPress themes and plugins.
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