Grow Your Accounting Business Online With WordPress

Accountants face a number of challenges in the online economy, especially when it comes to growing a successful business online.

Challenges Accountants Face Online

Now, more than ever, accountants must work harder to remain competitive, source new business, and keep their current clients. Not only do you have to actively participate in the communities and industries your business serves, you must also maintain an active presence online. This includes having an effective website and learning how to better promote your business online.

In addition to spending money in offline marketing, you will probably find (if you haven’t already) that in order to remain competitive, you will need to allocate a greater share of your budget towards the development and management of a website that brings in prospective clients, engages visitors, outranks the competition in search engines and social media, and helps you create a wider amount of reach online.

This means that your website not only has to look professional, your pages have to load fast, and be easy to navigate, but even more importantly, the needs of the website may change over time and some areas will need to be updated often. This requires having a well-developed web and content management strategy.

One other challenge that CPAs (and most professions) face online, is that your site has only around thirty seconds to help visitors find what they are looking for or they will look elsewhere.

“Websites have evolved into central information hubs where service information is still present but enhanced with web portals, hyperlinks to state and federal sites, and a variety of free tools.”

Michael Alter, http://www.accountingweb.com/technology/accounting-software/tips-for-improving-your-website

Online Opportunities For CPAs

As well as facing a number of significant business and technology changes, there are also many online opportunities available to accounting businesses that can evolve to meet the challenges of the online economy and who can think strategically about improving their online marketing skills.

In this comprehensive guide, you will learn about new ways and opportunities to increase web traffic and create significant improvements in your business results online.

As well as providing useful website improvement tips, we also focus on the benefits and advantages of using the WordPress Content Management System to power your accounting website or blog.

For more information about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress, go here:

Useful Tips For Improving Your Accounting Website

We’ll start first by going over some basics. In this section, we’ll look at how to improve your website and get better results. We show you what pages you need, what type of content works best for accounting websites, navigation structure, etc.

If you need assistance or help planning your accounting or financial services website, read this article we have written: A Practical Guide To Web Site Planning For Non-Technical Business Owners

Essential Web Pages

All business websites need several essential web pages. Let’s go over the pages your need and how to set up your website for best results.

Description Of Services

It’s essential to include a page that explains your services and any products that you offer.

Your page will include services such as:

Business accounting – business planning, company formation, accounting, payroll, preparing financial statements, book keeping, forecasting, financing, budgeting, strategic planning, consulting, etc.
Taxation – preparing, planning, reviewing, auditing, advice, problem resolution
Investment strategies
Corporate finance
Wealth creation
Superannuation/retirement plan (401k) advice
Audit risk assessment and assurance
Quickbooks – setup, training, tune up, and support
Specialist services – mergers, acquisitions, information technology, secretarial, rentals, trusts, fiduciary accounting, succession planning, selling businesses, asset transfers, etc.
Lending and leasing

List all of the services you provide. Educate your visitors about what these services do and why they should book an appointment.

About Us Page

This page needs to describe your business and what it stands for, its unique approach, supported community programs, etc.

Remember to also include any industry awards, accreditations, recognitions, certifications, associations, publications, etc., that could be used to promote the company and position it above the competition.

(List all of your business awards recognitions, certifications, accreditations, publications, associations, etc. in the About page. Image source: deloitte.com)

Your Staff

If you are looking for quicker, simpler and cost-effective ideas to sell more products or services online or get people to interact more on your site, then make it easier for prospects to get to know you, your team and your organization better.

Potential clients need to relate to your business. One great way to do that is to have a page that introduces your people. This page should include a photo and a mini biography. Since most visitors will not tend to be well-versed in accounting terms your bio descriptions should tell who they are and what their specialties are. You may also want to explain what those specialties mean. It should even include social buttons that will allow your site visitors to follow your team members on their social networks.

On this page, don’t be afraid to show the human side of your team members with personal stories, hobbies, etc., but make sure to outline your employee’s qualifications, why they are an asset to your team, and more importantly, how they will help add value to your clients’ business.

(Add a page that introduces your employees to prospective new clients. Screenshot source: deepsky.com)

To learn more about how to add a simple and easy-to-maintain list of staff members in your web site using free plugins, go here: Adding An Employee List Directory To Your WordPress Site: WordPress Plugin Tutorial

Recruitment

This is a listing of career opportunities within the organization. It could include training offered, benefits, professional development, social aspects of working for your firm, etc. You can also include information about new career opportunities in the accounting industry.

Maintain a positions available section in this page. If there are no positions currently available, consider inviting people to return periodically to the page, subscribe to your updates list, follow you on social media, etc.

Case Studies And Testimonials

Testimonials from past clients and case studies are a great way to show prospective clients businesses minimize tax, increase profitability, or grow strategically. Adding a page with client reviews and case studies also provides social proof online.

(Add a page to your site with case studies and testimonials. Image source: pcg-services.com)

To learn more about using testimonials and client reviews, see this article: How To Convert More Visitors Into Qualified Leads Using Highly Effective Testimonials

Contact Us Page

Having a contact page is crucial.

It should include some or all of the following information about your business:

Business Name
Your physical address
Phone
Facsimile
Email address
Google Map
Web address
Contact form
Request for information – who to contact
Links to social media pages
Interactive chat

If your business services several locations you want to make this clear when showing the address and contact information.

Consider also including a few links for commonly-asked questions, useful pages, special offers, support area, newsletter, blog, etc.

Add A Blog

A blog is a powerful marketing tool for your business. Most blogging platforms typically comprise of a content management system that is simple to use and allows you to promote your business using content such as news and events, product updates, useful articles and tutorials, informative posts, how-to videos, infographics, etc.

If you already have an accounting site, then consider adding a WordPress blog to promote your business.

If you don’t have a website yet, or your existing accounting site is very hard to add new content to or not giving you the results you want, then WordPress can be used both as your website and blog.

Not many businesses know this, but WordPress can turn into an automated traffic-generation machine that will help begin delivering targeted traffic to your website, simply by adding new content to your website on a consistent basis.

(WordPress can generate new traffic automatically to your website)

Go here to learn more about this: Website Traffic Blueprint – Learn How To Create An Automated Web Traffic Generation Machine With WordPress

Legal Pages

As a professional accountant or financial services provider, having a website that complies will all legal requirements online is vital, not just for building trust and credibility with visitors, but also to ensure that no laws or regulations are being breached wherever you provide services to.

Adding the following legal pages to your website will help you stay out of trouble with most regulatory authorities, third-party service providers (e.g. Facebook), and other potential legal threats and inconveniences:

Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Terms And Conditions
Website Disclaimer
Affiliate Agreement
Anti-Spam Policy
Compensation Disclosure
DMCA Notice
Earnings Disclaimer
External Links Policy
Health/Financial Disclaimers
Refund Policy
Video/Audio Terms
etc.

We have written a comprehensive article about adding legal pages to your site. Go here to learn more: Adding Legal Pages To Your Site

How To Improve Your Web Content

In today’s globally competitive economy, being generous with content that educates and informs visitors has become one of the key differentiators for businesses.

You want to provide great content with information and tips that will get your readers to share your content online with others and come back for more information. This is the most effective way to inform and teach site visitors and prospective clients about your business.

For example, topics for an accounting business could include the following:

Explanations of balance sheets
Overlooked tax deductions
Directors’ duties and legal responsibilities
Presenting accounts for non-profit activities
Business cashflow planning
Maximizing business insurance cover
Protecting revenues
Tips on structuring your self-managed retirement fund
Do’s and don’ts of … (e.g. purchasing vs leasing, claiming business expenses, etc.)

You can also create a series of informative articles that will help your prospective clients gain a better understanding of your accounting or financial services, such as finance accounting, small business accounting, office accounting software, reducing business debt, financial concepts made simple, etc.

Remember to use relevant keywords and terms in your articles that your prospective clients will be searching for online.

We recommend subscribing to our Content Marketing Email Training Series. You will receive a comprehensive series of training emails with actionable information and practical tips that will show exactly how to drive more traffic to your site, save money creating useful content that will add value to your site visitors and grow your business online using content. It’s not only a great course with loads of useful information, it’s also 100% FREE!

Improve Visitor Engagement And User Experience

Improving your user experience (typically referred to as UX) helps keep visitors coming back and using your site. This section will show you different ways to improve your visitor engagement and user experience.

Using RSS Feeds

RSS feeds provide lots of benefits for your business.

If you provide valuable content, other sites may want to syndicate your content.

Some of the benefits of syndicating your content to other sites using RSS feeds, include:

All of your updates are kept in one place
Doesn’t rely on email
Your feed can be shared online
Users can subscribe to your RSS feed
It provides links back to your content
Your feeds can be submitted to RSS directories and aggregators
RSS provides a number of ways for your readers to receive your content (e.g. view the content on their mobile device using different applications)
RSS is built into WordPress

There are also a number of benefits to adding syndicated content to your website from other sites, such as the fact that you don’t have to write, manage or update the content.

To find RSS feeds with loads of useful content just search online for finance-related government departments or respected industry bodies.

For example, here are some exaples of feeds you may want to consider adding to your website:

Taxation Policy Center: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/press/rss.cfm
Australian Taxation Office: https://www.ato.gov.au/RSS-news-feeds.aspx
Canada Revenue Agency: http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/rssfeeds/
UK HM Revenue and Customs: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rss/rss.htm
South Africa Revenue Service: http://www.sars.gov.za/Pages/RSS-Feeds.aspx

(RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds can help to improve your website’s user experience.)

Checklists And Forms

Checklists and forms are a great way to help increase visitor engagement, add value to your readers and set yourself apart from the competition. Checklists and forms can provide visitors with useful step-by-step instructions and resources to perform necessary tasks. Forms and checklists can also be great planning tools.

Checklists and forms could address areas such as:

How To Set Up A Company
Negative Gearing Checklist
Not-For-Profit Activity Checklist
Disclosure Checklists
Individual Tax Checklist
Trust Tax Checklist
Income Tax Variation Forms

Add Other Tools

Providing unique tools and applications for businesses (or links to these tools) is a great way to increase visitor engagement and significantly add value to potential clients. Calculators, such as loan and tax calculators, are useful tools to add to accounting websites. Others would include time cards, or retirement and interest calculators.

In part two, we discuss a several WordPress plugins you can use in your website that can improve your search engine optimization, increase user engagement and generate more traffic to your business.

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This is the end of part 1.

To view the rest of this guide, click here:

How To Grow Your Accounting Business Online – Part 2

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